The future of media is the Internet. Advertisers are starting to realize that more ad dollars have to be allocated to the web. In Q1, a record 1,100,000,000,000 display ads were served to US Internet users. That’s 15% higher than last year. Total ad spending for the Qtr reached $2.7 billion. So who do you think iwas the largest display advertiser in the 11st Qtraa/ none other than fascebook with 176 billion impression. this was the first time in a long time that yahoo has been beat in this category. They came in 2nd with 132 billion ads served.
Last year online spending reached $ 22.6 Billion as opposed to magazine ad sales which which totaled $19.5 Billion. This is the first time that Internet spending was higher than magazine spending. However, overall there was a 3.4% dip in overall ad spending from 2008. I think with the economy on the rebound we should see a further increase in spending this year. Hopefully those added dollars will flow to domainers and not get lost in the Yahoo/Google black hole.
Recently I had the opportunity to talk with some well known internet pioneers. This was totally by accident but I took the opportunity to ask them a few questions. The specific part of the conversation that I want to mention was our talk on domains and also our discussion of the larger internet companies. For generic domains, 3 out of the 4 thought they were the one of the best investments you could make to help get a jump on the competition in a specific category. They thought .com for business in the US was a necessity. They split as wether to use the domain alone as the business name or use it to direct traffic to the home page or related part of their business. All 4 thought the new tld’s would cause more confusion and mostly likely make business spend more money to protect their bands.
As for the Internet, we discussed what major companies would be on top 10 years from today. While 2 did not want to go out that far, they all agreed that Google’s grasp is enormous and if any company would be out in front it was them. They also gave high marks Ebay, Amazon and Facebook. When I asked about Yahoo, they felt that it was finally going in the right direction but in their minds they fell behind the other mentioned.
Please let me know your thoughts.