SEO Blog

An interesting report from the Kelsey Group predicts the interactive classified advertising market will grow from its current $3.9Billion spend to over $14.7Billion by 2010. Advancing at a phenomenal 30.5% compounded annual growth rate, the increase in ad-spend will come primarily from traditional media such as newspapers, radio and television. A radical increase in online advertising dollars is not extraordinary news to the search marketing community. We’ve sensed and benefited from this shift in the sensibilities of advertisers for several years now.

What might be a surprise to many search marketers are the exact directions that increased ad-spending is likely to go in. According to the report, much of that money will be focused on highly vertical markets such as home services, home and garden care, health care, legal, finance and auto repair. Because items or inventory from each of these vertical sectors tend to have specific search tools or sections of larger search engines dedicated to them, search results from those categories might soon be found faster amd more easily “off-Google” than at-Google.

To quote search journalist Michelle Greer, “Apparently, some online advertisers are realizing that having ads on the 60th page of a Google keyword search isn’t exactly fruitful.” This is a scenario in which Google becomes its own worst enemy, leading searchers and advertisers to focus their attentions elsewhere.

The CBC, Bloomberg and the New York Times are reporting that European regulators are expected to approve Google’s $3.1Billion acquisition of display ad network DoubleClick sometime next week.

EU approval is the final hurdle standing in the way of the buy-out. When completed, Google’s purchase of DoubleClick will mark the biggest buy in Google’s history, nearly doubling the $1.65Billion spent acquiring YouTube.

The deal with also solidify Google as the largest online advertising channel with an estimated 65% of total online ad-spend moving through the Mountain View CA based company. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, amount spent advertising online will approach $50Billion in 2009.

A conglomeration of four large American newspaper companies is forming to sell advertising space on the Internet sites of newspapers those companies own. It is estimated that the total advertising audience could reach over 50 million unique visitors each month.

The new advertising company, quadrantONE, will receive a portion of online ad-space on sites owned by The Tribune Company, Hearst Newspapers, the Gannet Company, and The New York Times Company. Three well known newspapers included in the advertising conglom are: The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and the Houston Chronical. There are several smaller, more localized papers included as well.

The basic idea seems to revolve around a one-call ad center based in Chicago that will automatically feed online advertising to each newspaper property, an important efficiency not reached by other online news ad-schemes such as Yahoo’s newspaper consortium, the Newspaper National Network, or the New Century Network of the late 1990’s.

Sensing an opening and trying to recoup massive advertising losses, the introduction of quadrantONE into the online advertising market by the biggest US publishers further demonstrates an inherent weakness in that marketplace. Currently, online advertising is dominated by Google AdWords with Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN’s adCenter running far behind.

Following Microsoft’s bid to take Yahoo, interest is circulating around another former Internet giant, AOL. According to Marketing Shift blogger John Gartner, Comcast is interested in grabbing AOL’s assets away from TimeWarner which conveniently wishes to shed them. Comcast’s interest is bound to pique Google’s, which already has a 5% interest in AOL.

Interestingly, Comcast and Google want AOL for completely different reasons. Comcast is one of the largest Telco ISPs in the United States. It wants to absorb AOL’s massive base of dial-up and high-speed subscribers. Google is the largest search engine on the ‘net. It wants to take advantage of AOL’s vast user-audience to expand its own advertising opportunities. Google already serves most ads shown at AOL but it doesn’t want to watch AOL’s market-share go to Comcast.

It is possible for TimeWarner to divide AOL into its two component pieces with ISP services going to Comcast and information services going to Google. Perhaps that would be the best move TW’s board could make. Though it makes sense for the worlds largest traditional publisher to have its own mega-network, TimeWarner has never been able to properly serve its info stream via AOL’s network.