Online ad growth grinds to a halt | Hacker News Reader

Online ad growth grinds to a halt

techcrunch.com

26 pointsvaksel23 comments

Sorry, but those are quarter to quarter growth rates - which, for seasonal industries, need to be year-to-year instead (unless he shows what these same quarters did in the previous years). He said that it is 18% higher in 2008 Q3 than 2007 Q3. It could be that every year the big jump is from Q3 to Q4! And, perhaps, every year, the quarterly jumps from Q4->Q1, Q1->Q2, Q2->Q3 are relatively small.

Also, as someone noted in the TC comments, this is all in USD, which I presume is safe, but I don't know what fraction of ad sales are logged in international currencies, and the dollar has gained recently.

Agreed. Incomplete. Slow news day, so let's make some of those charts that everyone loves to look at to pull in traffic.

Online ad growth is tied to economic growth. News at 11.

There is a large group who has argued that online ad growth would be fine in a recession because businesses would shift their ad dollars into more targeted and more measurable and results-oriented mediums. I haven't really believed this argument - even if it's true then owning a bigger piece of a smaller and smaller pie can't be sustainable for every long. Even so, this argument should still be taken seriously, and data that might disprove it is therefore newsworthy.

I think there will actually be a certain amount of this; that is, advertising dollars will migrate to the web, at the expense of traditional media. That being said, overall ad spending will fall, spending on traditional media will get hammered, and online ad spending will also get hurt, just not as much as traditional advertising.

Such overgeneralizations are useless. How much are they tied? How the effect of recession compares to the already known trends?

Oh well, time to brush off the old "sell dog food online" business plan.

I just bought some ads on Facebook ... just trying to do my part for the economy.

For companies that still have the budget to purchase online ads, do you think this could be a good thing? I'm thinking less competition and lower CPCs ... I'm fairly new to buying online ads, so I'm not sure.

You should write about how those end up working out for you. Despite their poor click through percentage, I've heard good things about them from a value standpoint.

Good idea ... so far, 1 new customer from 110 clicks. Not terrible I suppose.

Buy low, sell high, right? If you're going to spend money on ads, the best time might be when they're cheap. You may not get a lot of customers, but you might get a lot of traction.

This sucks for sites that rely on ads, but at least it's not the quarter to quarter decline the publishing industry is and has been witnessing.

Hopefully now we'll see more startups building products that sell, instead of free stuff with ad spam.

eh I don't mind that, just install adblock and you get the stuff for free w/o being annoyed by ads.

Yeah, but if everybody did that you'd no longer get that free stuff...

There are certain things you can't simply charge for successfully. Not many people would pay a subscription to read a blog, for instance.

There are a variety of free-to-many-of-you revenue models which do not involve advertising, at least not in the sense of you-pay-me-to-rent-eyeballs-that-I-collect advertising.

Example: Nobody has paid a dime to read my blog. I have not and will not ever sell an ad on it. But I have made a few hundred dollars (hmm, might be 4 figures by now, will have to check) from mentions of my own software. And I did get a publishing opportunity from it (I wrote a chapter in a book about how to do business blogging -- see http://www.blogblazers.com if you're interested). And the increased visibility in my topical community has translated into links and an SEO advantage for my business. And all of these things figure into my worth to my company.

But nobody has ever paid to read my blog.

From 12.73% growth in Q4-07 to .61% growth in Q3-08

I'm amazed that it is still growing.

wow, so wrong interpretation of data.

What is wrong with their interpretation?

The data are incomplete as they don't account for possible seasonality as brfox pointed out, and because they don't include small ad networks.

The problem with online ads is that TV ads are so much easier to brainwash people with. When using internets, human primates use their thinkers (a tiny tiny bit, see youtube comments), when using TV, they don't.

So if you want to manipulate the human primates to pull the levers that get you the most bananas, and you are using online ads, you won't be able to use the decades of brainwashing techniques evolved to malevolently manipulate people's behaviors in favor of the advertiser. So the ads won't work nearly as good over large populations.

When I use the interwebs, I choose where my attention goes. That tiny amount of cognitive freedom is completely incompatible with most advertising philosophy. That's why Fox News hates bloggers, that's why ads will crash fastest online, and that's why the internet is good for humanity.

All this crap about growth rates of online ad sales is really just gloss on the relationship between the efficacy of different kinds of advertising and brainwashing. Web advertising is less brainwashing friendly, so the people who need to do brainwashing (concentrated powers) will use it less when times are tight. Google will suffer less, because it's web advertising involve stuff it's customers are looking to pay attention too.

And how does this chart account for possible factors such as:

People leaving for a different, newer platform. More Ad dollars being funnelled into platforms which don't restrict the type of content on which they're delivered. Sites that pull ads due to setting up their own delivery systems

etcetera

it doesn't matter that much if the pie is growing or shrinking right now anyway...the point is that the way the pie is sliced up is turning into a winner-take-all economy, with the overwhelming center of gravity being google. in ten years 95% or more of all ad revenue will be flowing to google if the trends continue. you can even see this from other established ad placers like aol and yahoo...every quarter, google pulls more share from them.

this was to be expected. the web ad market is nearly frictionless and google will be placing ads everywhere. the non-google web is going to move to a cable-tv model (monthly fees)....its the only way people will survive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com