Abbreviated Marketing News Round-up
October 10th, 2009 | Published in Marketing News Round-up
Local Online Advertising To Rise Only 5% In 2010
Online advertising will increase just 5% to $14.9 billion next year as a lagging economic recovery and a maturing Web ad market combine to further slow growth, according to a new report from Borrell Associates.
That rate would be less than half the 12% gain (to $14.2 billion) that the local media research firm projects this year, and well below the torrid 45% annual growth of the last five years. In addition to the impact of economic downturn, Borrell said the diminishing returns reflect a local online ad category rapidly approaching “saturation.”
Borrell expects that the 13.8% share that online makes up of all local advertising will peak at 16% by 2013. As a result, Borrell predicts that local Web advertising will post an anemic 2.9% growth rate over the next five years.
The Nielsen Company reports that time spent on social network and blogging sites accounted for 17% of all time spent on the Internet in August 2009, nearly triple the percentage of time spent on the sector a year ago.
Year-over-year, estimated online advertising spend on the top social network and blogging sites increased 119% to approximately $108 million in August 2009. The share of estimated spend on these sites has also grown, increasing from a 7% share of total online ad spend in August 2008 to a 15% share in August 2009.
Men More Likely To Ditch Traditional Media for Digital
Men are more likely than women to say that the internet has replaced their need to read printed newspapers and magazines, and also are more likely to be willing to pay for a subscription to an online newspaper or for a service to watch online TV with limited ads, according to a US consumer trend study by TargetCast.
But while the study (PDF) found the future of traditional media—particularly newspapers, magazines and radio – to be increasingly challenged by a rapid migration of hard-to-reach consumer groups to digital alternatives, it also revealed that internet ads are have lower overall purchase influence.
September Search Share: Google Grows, Yahoo & Bing Decline
Google accounted for 71.08% of all US searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 3, 2009, while Yahoo Search, Bing and Ask.com received 16.38%, 8.96% and 2.56%, respectively, according to an analysis by Experian Hitwise.
Despite a significant challenge from Bing since the alternative search engine’s introduction in June, Google’s share of search increased 1% over August 2009, when it stood at 70.24%. And while both Yahoo and Bing together account for 25% of US search share, Yahoo saw a decline of 3% vs. September, while Bing’s share slid 5%. The remaining 52 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.04% of all US searches.
