Forum Moderators: phranque
Spending on online advertising in the first quarter declined for the first time in more than three years when compared to the fourth quarter, the Interactive Advertising Bureau said on Tuesday.Dollars spent on online advertising totaled $5.8 billion in the first quarter, up 18.2 percent from the year-ago period, but down from $5.9 billion in the 2007 fourth quarter, the IAB said.
"The cyclical fourth quarter to first quarter drop in traditional media advertising spend, combined with an overall economic slowdown, resulted in a not-so-expected first-quarter slowdown in the growth of online advertising," said David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which helped compile the figures.
Online Ad Sales Take a Dip, According to IAB [reuters.com]
... but the number of pages showing ads continued to increase at a loopy rate.
You do the math :(
up 18.2 percent from the year-ago period
18%+ increase from the same time period last year? Sounds like a good growth rate to me! How many sectors see consistent demand all year long?
18%+ increase from the same time period last year? Sounds like a good growth rate to me! How many sectors see consistent demand all year long?
But this is the first quarter that didn't outpace the previous quarter in three years. It's not that the sky is falling, but that the train is slowing down.
Ad-providers (google etc) will just keep cranking up the opportunities for Ad-buyers until the end of time. When the buyers get their heads back and start to check and discriminate a bit - then conversion-quality will return to the process.
Content creators can't earn income anymore, except for the big ones. The "How to earn money with Adsense" article should be rewritten with new title - "How to spend years and fortune building content site and not earn any money".
On the opposite end, advertisers check their conversions and get frustrated with traffic that is shady and TOO EXPENSIVE. Remember mantra everyone's chanting "if you earn $2.00 on a visitor you can pay $1.99 for it"? Well - it is BULLSH*T. There's also returns, complaints, damaged merchandise, legal issues, cash flow issues, unforeseen problems, gas prices going up, etc. etc. At best, you can pay $1.50 for a visitor, probably even less, or you are OUT OF BUSINESS. My guess is G$$gle overestimated advertiser's profits in their quest to jam more income from them. So advertisers shrank budgets and limited keywords in return.
Welcome to the WEB 2.0 Slowdown.
The rest? Down the toilet. All metrics down.
The difference between the sites:
The one that's doing well: Lots of quality content, steady growth in traffic, generally very good ad targeting by G, and the subject matter is 'in season' so it's time for advertisers to spend more.
The rest: Smaller sites catering to other topics. Some have really lousy ad targeting. Most have very poor CTRs and eCPM. Some have fallen precipitously, prompting us to consider removing AdSense from the sites altogether, due to the phenomenally bad ad targeting (the ads just make the site look lame, even more than one would expect.)
Sometimes I wish Google would just give us the ability to block ads per URL and/or per keyword(s) showing up in the ad text or landing URLs. That way, webmasters could regain some control over the ads that show on our sites. But I am reminded that that is not in Google's best interest to give us such control....
