Carat, one of the world's largest media agencies, asserts that online is becoming the third-largest advertising medium this year. It is pulling ahead of radio, even if it remains quite behind television and print media.
Online will hold about 8.6 per cent of world spending, up from 7.3 per cent a year ago. Radio is off only slightly, to 7.4 per cent from 7.5 per cent.
Television has about a 41-per-cent share, while print weighs in at about 36 per cent.
Aggregators abound, but the newish site Fwix.com has found a formula that translates content into local streams. It's yet another challenger in a crowded field, but its algorithm appears to have a strong scraping capability that yields a relevant result. Until now, though, it hadn't developed a commenting capability. I've been following Steve Outing's noble online exercise to reinvigorate the challenged classified section in the newspaper. It's a genuinely positive attempt to lend a community's assistance to a widespread problem. If it's possible to create a community of interest, what about a community of principal and interest? The Star-Tribune from Minneapolis-St. Paul took a different approach to its editorial board online starting today. While Google has always professed no interest in becoming a content creator, there is no such reluctance at Yahoo, which has its own corps of reporters and has been leveraging its clout to gain the sort of exclusive access once preserved for the so-called old media. Vin Crosbie, one of the most successful media commentators and analysts, has returned to the fray after a year off and fired off a compelling essay on the decline of U.S. newspapers. He predicts that fully half will expire by the end of the next decade, starting with regional dailies and then progressing into the smaller local ones. The quite entertaining Valleywag site steps into the newspaper fray with a five-point diagnosis of what ails newspapers. In a word: Deadlines. Sir Martin Sorrell, the head of the international WPP advertising agency, suggests 2009 will be a difficult year for advertising in the U.S. because a new president will have some challenging economic issues to tackle. The U.S. and Europe are also going to be hit by the economic slowdown, a post-Beijing Games spending slowdown by advertisers, and commodity price increases that will stretch corporate budgets and reduce the advertising spend. Editor & Publisher has created a special report on the challenges in the U.S. newspaper industry. While there is nothing particularly new in its piece, the magazine does a very good job in summarizing the combination of fear, confusion, stubbornness and confidence that spans the industry. |