Online advertisers cinch up the belts, survival of the fittest rules the day
By Triston McIntyre
The world of online advertising is shifting. What was once a free-for-all for any and every website’s advertising space is now becoming a very fine-tuned search for the perfect groups of customers for advertisers to target. Is the end to broad canvas-like advertising near, and will the websites who can’t adapt and evolve get the axe?
Analysts are weighing in on the advertising expenditures for the upcoming year, and things don’t look good…2008 will demonstrate a drop in advertising to $1.43 billion from $1.6 billion in 2007. Though that isn’t a doomsday message, it does demonstrate that advertisers are becoming more cautious in their ventures.
There seem to be two emerging trends in advertising that coincide with the scaled-back expenditures in internet advertising.
The first is that advertisers are moving away from spending huge amounts to advertise on large websites with broad scope. Analysts predict that large social websites like Facebook and MySpace will suffer because advertisers are recognizing the target audiences of the social titans are just too big for “targeted” advertising to really be effective.
Beyond that, online newspapers are seeing advertising growth plateau, according to Paid Content. That very well may be similar to the problem the larger social sites are having; with such large reader bases, advertisers just aren’t seeing the value in spending money that might not produce dividends that please the advertising companies.
The next logical step beyond lowering expenditures to large sites that aren’t really paying off for the companies advertisers represent is to go after the smaller, more focused websites that promise immediate payoff. That means websites or blogs that focus on hot topics like Mp3s, for instance, look like gold to advertisers, according to Paid Content. The easiest way to target advertisements would be to reach the customers you want where they blog and communicate, right?
The second method of attacking this new era in advertising could be best represented by Glam Media, a company that just recently surpassed the advertising “reach” of Facebook, according to Venture Beat. Glam Media has taken up the interesting pursuit as a media group of actually buying up advertising groups, recently Monetize Limited of the U.K.
By purchasing an advertising group, a large media company like Glam can directly control the way its advertisements are handled. Beyond that, Glam can solve the problem of maintaining a large advertising “reach” without suffering the ill-effects many one-trick advertisers have with approaching broad viewer communities.
With ad-revenue putting food on the tables for most websites, it will be important to keep a close eye on online advertising trends. Don’t go the way of the dodo bird (which I am sure would have also been left behind, had it been involved in internet media).
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