Losing ad revenue? Where are your advertisers going? More advertisers signing up? Why are they coming to you? Here's a brief view of current trends in advertising, trends which quite possibly will become permanent characteristics of the market.
Large papers losing/local papers gaining: "It's not just that untargeted advertising looks old-fashioned. It's that there are increasingly viable, more finely targeted and cost-effective ways to advertise." Quoted on the New York Times (NYT), ad exec Mark DiMassimo recently saw one of his major clients pull out of the national newspaper market claiming they wanted to try a more local approach, possibly through the internet. Local advertising is targeted in a way that advertisers can more efficiently track the response, unlike the broad scope resulting from an ad in a large national paper. The numbers show that this is a trend not to be ignored. For example, Dow Jones lost 10.8% of its first quarter ad revenue from its domestic and international papers. But it's local group, Ottaway Newspapers division crept up 1.9%. The NYT Company's ad income rose a mere 0.8% but it's local divisions increased their ad share by 7.2%.
Classified market may be lost: AdAge writes that during last weeks annual conference of the Newspaper Association of America, delegates discovered that their newspapers could lose 9%, or USD 4billion, of their ad revenues by 2007 simply from the migration of classifieds to the Internet. Websites like Craigslist who have localized and provide free ads have been gradually nipping away at newspapers' classifieds. Furthermore, Luis Ubinas, an executive at a major consulting firm pointed out that, "Online is capturing all the growth," and another delegate was overheard fearing that the newspaper classified business "(will) never come back."
General Internet ad growth: A recently published report from Zenith Optimedia cited at MediaGuardian concludes that over time, the Web's share of world advertising revenue could "easily double" and that it will consistently show double-digit growth over the next three years. Next year's predicted Internet ad revenue growth was even reanalyzed, raising it to 6.5%. But newspaper advertising is still healthy according to Zenith's Adam Smith. "You have got to keep a sense of proportion - the internet is nowhere near the size of newspaper ad spend anywhere."
Google: Recently claiming it's first quarter profits shot up six times (USD 369m profit on 1.26bn in revenue) and already topping major papers' ad revenue, Google plans to expand on its share of Internet advertising. The search engine is looking to diversify from its small text-based GoogleAds by attracting bigger names with different pricing methods and animated technology.
