Death of display ads greatly exaggerated

An article on Reuters today (US Web ad spending nears $10 bln in first half '07) discussed how ad spending on the Internet continues to increase, putting pressure on other media like newspapers, TV and radio.

This is a quote from the last two paragraphs:

"Search advertising, led by Google, remained the most popular form of online marketing and accounted for 41 percent of the money spent at $4.1 billion in the first half of 2007.

Graphic display advertising, such as banners, grew to account for 32 percent at $3.2 billion, compared with $2.4 billion in the year-earlier period."

There has been much discussion on financial blogs about how display advertising is losing ground to other kinds of ads, how it is hopelessly Web 1.0 and that companies dependent on display ads are doomed. Yahoo is usually mentioned in these discussions as a prime example of a site dependent on display ads and, as if to prove the point, we all know how badly Yahoo is doing these days.

The fact that display advertising spending has increased by one third over the previous year shows that display ads still have considerable life left in them. Witness Google buying DoubleClick for over $3 billion dollars; after all, a large part of DoubleClick's business is serving display ads. Google realizes that display ads are a necessary part of a full-service ad platform and, combined with search advertising (Google's specialty), display ads will allow the company to extend its reach with advertisers and publishers.

Yahoo's problem is not that they are dependent on display ads; Yahoo's problem is that they are not executing as well as they should be in other areas.

Disclosure: author owns no shares in GOOG or YHOO

Comments

Brazil - in a bubble or on a roll?

A couple of years ago, no one recognized the real estate bubble even though it was under everyone's nose. Now, analysts and bloggers are seeing bubbles everywhere they look. One of them, they say is in Brazil whose Bovespa stock market index has doubled in the last 12 months. Does the bubble accusation hold water? I don't think so and here are 7 reasons why Brazil is by no means a bubble economy: Exports have held up over the past year thanks to demand from China for Brazil's soya exports and iron ore. This was helped by the the Brazilian government's drive to improve trade links with Asia and Africa. Export diversification, spurred by a more active trade policy and increased focus on "south-south" trade under current president Lula, helped mitigate the decline in demand from OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries A "sensible" economic framework has been in place since the 1990's. This has included inflation

Trade Radar gets another update

Some of our data sources changed again and it impacted our ability to load fundamental/financial data. In response, we are rolling out a new version of the software: 7.1.24 The data sourcing issues are fixed and some dead links in the Chart menu were removed. So whether you are a registered user or someone engaged in the free trial, head over to our update page and download the latest version. The update page is here: https://tradingstockalerts.com/software/downloadpatch Contact us if you have questions or identify any new issues.

Unlock Stock Market Profits - Key #1

This is the first in an ongoing series of articles where I discuss what I feel are keys to successful investing. It is based on a post that provides a summary of the ten keys that individual investors should use to identify profitable stock trades. ( Click here to read the original post ) There are two basic steps to investing. First, you need to find stocks that seem to have some potential. Then you have to determine whether these stocks are actually good investments. There are many stocks that at first glance look interesting, but further research reveals that there are too many negatives to warrant taking a position. This first post in the series starts at the beginning: getting good investment ideas. Key #1: If something special is happening to a stock, it will be reflected in some kind of unusual activity in the markets. As individual investors, we will never be the first to know; however, unusual activity can be an early sign that allows us to follow the Wall Street professional

the Trade-Radar + TradingStockAlerts blog

Search This Blog