Marketing Pilgrim

As if the news of yesterday regarding display ads wasn’t troubling enough there is more down news about a traditional providerof growth in internet marketing: the local ad market. As reported in the WSJ the local ad market is slowing down like other areas of internet marketing. Here’s a summary of the situation.

Online spending by local U.S. advertisers, which grew by 45% in 2008 to $12.7 billion, is expected to see growth fall to 5.4% in 2009, according to media-research firm Borrell Associates. Total U.S. online ad spending is expected to be about flat, declining 0.3% to $36.9 billion in 2009, compared with growth of 8.5% in 2008, Borrell says.

The Wall Street Journal posted a story that further tells the tale of woe for display ads. I don’t think that the news is shocking to most but what is becoming is a little disconcerting is the consistent trend downward and little hope for a real reversal of fortune in the near future.

Companies like Time Warner’s AOL (no surprise there), Yahoo and the New York Times Co. are suffering from decreased revenue but it’s not correct to blame it all on the economy. What you say? Isn’t that where we place the blame for everything? It’s the economy stupid. We can’t make money in this economy. You’ve heard the all the excuses and blame placing possible and it is mostly blamed on the economy. Seems fitting that on the day that the ginormous stimulus package is signed off on by the President that this mantra would continue.

If ever you need proof that Wall Street is nothing but a herd of sheep, take a look at Google’s PPS today.

That came after Google’s stock was downgraded at ThinkEquity.

So, you’re telling me that yesterday Google was a great company, with the strength to power through the recession, but not today?

Crazy, crazy!

Bloody brilliant!

A new report suggests that Yahoo is head and shoulders above Google in one key area and it happens to be a product that the struggling web company won’t release to the general public!

According to an email received from CMS Watch, Yahoo! Web Analytics outshines Google Analytics in many ways:

• Better access control options and simpler approach to multi-site analytics
• Larger default monthly page-view limits (200MM vs. 5MM – unless you have an active AdWords campaign)
• Access to traffic data: Both vendors retain the right to hold and use your web analytics data for their own purposes, but only Yahoo! gives you the ability to export out your raw, unaggregated data
• Longer historical availability of raw data

As we continue to fly ahead with all of our Internet intensity there is one person who has been around since the beginning of the ‘net who talks in cautionary terms. It may be worth our time to slow down for just a minute and pay attention.

Vint Cerf is widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of the internet. His work with ARPANET and creating the inner workings of the modern Internet infrastructure are beyond most of us. He certainly doesn’t look like the rest of those who ‘claim’ the Internet as their own. He’s simply older than us but he also talks about the Internet in terms of being 30 to 40 years old. I usually get impressed when someone says they have been designing web sites and optimizing etc, etc since 1994 which is a mere 15 years ago. In an age where youth is valued far too much at times we should look to experience to help us in the future.

Some of us measure our popularity in the number of Facebook friends we have. Facebook measures its popularity in the number of “active users” it has—and that number hit 175,000,000 on Friday the 13th, according to a Tweet from Dave Morin of Facebook.

This comes 39 days after the site reached 150 million active users early last month. While from some reports, Facebook was adding 600,000 new active users per day in early December, the longer term average was far below that (the dates here, except for the date on the final report, are taken from CNET stories):

• From August 26 to November 3, the site added 20 million users in 69 days, or about 290,000 per day.