Goldman Sachs Predicts $12.3 Billion Online Ad Market In '05


GOLDMAN SACHS HAS JOINED THE ranks of online marketing observers predicting a bullish year in 2005. In its third annual Internet usage study, released this week, the financial firm said that 2005 could be the "breakout year" for online advertising, and that the market would increase by 28 percent to reach $12.3 billion. The report, based on 2,000 surveys fielded by Synovate, also predicts that online advertising could account for as much as 7 percent of total ad spending by 2009--up from between 4 and 5 percent last year--and that search will represent more than 50 percent of all online ad dollars. "Top 200 advertisers have transitioned from testing online advertising to making it a permanent component of their marketing mix," stated the report.

Towards the semantic web?

Recently there have been some democratic efforts to provide support for users like you and me to add some structure on the WWW. One such effort is from Technorati - the popular blog search engine. Technorati has proposed a HTML tag (rel="tag") for Bloggers to categorize their posts. These tags are called Technorati Tags and users can either search for content using the "tag:" prefix in their query or browse for Technorati Tags of interest.

Other such "social bookmarking" where users can post links of interest and categorize them using keywords are Del.icio.us and Furl. Each of these are efforts to democratically group and in some way, rank content on the WWW using explicit user input rather than the implicit ranking calculations of Google PageRank -like technology.

The idea of the semantic web mentioned in the title of this post is to incorporate metadata into web content - and these tags could be the first step in this direction. The only difference is that the web today empowers consumers of content to contribute to tagging content rather than just the creator.

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semantic web technorati tags

Google's Efforts to Battle Comment Spam

Google is attempting to enhance the web experience with its recent proposal to battle comment spam by using the rel="tag">no follow attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks on sections of sites that allow users to post comments and links. I think this is one case of the intention being good but the implementation being wrong. They need to figure out a way to battle comment spam without killing the comments section. I have to agree with John Battelle's views that this may be a double-edged sword which can reduce the incentive for users to post intelligent comments in the comments section. There is a lot of insightful dialogue in the comments section which may reduce and eventually vanish if that content and the creators of that content are not valued by search engines.

Google Stock Lockup Expiration

Google has seen fantastic valuation by the market, more than doubling in value since its IPO. Following up on my previous post regarding the Google IPO, here is an article that talks about how the market could react to the impending employee stock lockup expiration releasing the largest block of Google shares to be traded in the open market. Google has trumped all negative prophecies before but this may well be the biggest test for its stock.

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