Economia em baixa na rede

Muito oportuno o relato do State of The News Media sobre a economia da rede. Bom para anotar.

Display Advertising

Even before the economic meltdown in the fall, Veronis Suhler Stevenson projected that the growth rate of display advertising revenue online would slow to 13.9%, down from growth rates of 15.6% in 2007 and 38% in 2006. Later in 2008, the market research firm eMarketer projected an even steeper drop in the growth rate. In December, it estimated that by year’s end online display advertising would have grown by only 3.9%.

Search Advertising

Before the credit crunch hit in September, eMarketer projected paid search advertising would increase by 40% during 2008. After the crisis, they revised that downward, to 21.4%.

Video Advertising

Advertising in online video and rich media — which refers to any moving or dynamic web content such as a news ticker that scrolls across a web page or streaming video — was projected to grow by 44% in 2008, to $3.6 billion, from $2.5 billion a year earlier. The good news is that the rate of growth here is expanding. In the preceding five years video ad revenue grew by an annual compounded rate of 33%.The bad news is that the figure of $3.6 billion represents only 10% of Internet advertising, which itself is not as large in 2008 as people expected.

Advertising on the Cellphone

One other potential source of expanding the universe of digital advertising is móbile. There are about 40 million active users of the mobile Web, according to Nielsen Mobile. As that number increases, there will be an increasing demand for information on mobile devices.

Advertisers have taken note of these increases and have shifted spending to mobile devices. They were expected to spend $1.3 billion in 2008, up 59% from a year earlier, according to data from Veronis Suhler Stevenson.

The rate was expected to slow somewhat, to a compound annual rate of 34% between 2007 and 2012. That would put mobile ad revenue $3.6 billion at the end of the period.

In the end

... the economics of the Web seemed to be moving even farther away from news in 2008, and the recession is only making that problem harder. It seems increasingly clear that news sites need to move further into search, but it is not clear they are succeeding, and the shift of local advertising to national portals may be especially ominous. The prospects of new technology, such as mobile and video, are promising, but the scale is not yet there, and there is no certainty that news will capture these either.

The solution, increasingly, seems to point to new models. But the innovations here seem small and experimental. There is, in short, a long way to go for news economics online, and abundant reasons for concern about whether it will ever happen.

íntegra

LM