Online Advertising Pushes Through

APRIL 8, 2009

The recession slows, but does not stop, online ad growth.

As strange as it may sound, the economic downturn may speed up the transition to digital advertising for many marketers.

The Internet’s share of total media ad spending is rising by at least 1 percentage point every year. Simply put: Marketers are spending more on Internet ads, while spending less on advertising in other media, such as newspapers, radio and magazines.

Furthermore, eMarketer projects that the online share of ad dollars will continue to grow, rising from nearly 10% this year to slightly more than 15% in 2013.

“The spending shifts predate the recession,” says David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, US Advertising Spending: The New Reality. “But the current economy is reinforcing the new advertising models—and making them more permanent.”

Does this make sense in light of the fact that the rate of growth for even Internet ad spending is slowing? Mr. Hallerman thinks it does.

“Digital marketing offers compelling benefits, especially for cash-conscious companies,” he says. “Marketers can more readily measure the results of Internet advertising than with most traditional media. This produces more-efficient advertising and higher ROI, which in turn pushes traditional media to compete with lower pricing.”

Which puts more pressure on traditional media’s bottom line.

“At the same time, successful Internet advertising creates a new paradigm for marketing on other media,” adds Mr. Hallerman. “Search is the prime example of the new model.”

When marketers link ads to an individual’s stated interest at the precise moment that interest is expressed—as happens with a search query—relevance breaks down the usual resistance.

“Advertising that consumers welcome is the new reality,” says Mr. Hallerman, “combining effectiveness with efficiency for marketers.”

And in the not-so-long run, that’s where the money will go.

A Pricing Revolution Looms in Online Advertising

Demographic profiling and behavioral targeting by such companies as Google, Quantcast, and ValueClick is slashing ad costs and threatening Web publishers

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2009/tc2009045_367596.htm

By Ben Kunz

Look just to the right of this article. There, on your computer screen, lies a little, two-dimensional secret that will soon threaten major online publishers and their precious advertising revenue.

It's called the banner ad, and its cost may plummet.

For a decade, Web site publishers have relied on an old advertising model: Publishers provided advertisers access to readers, and the more desirable those readers, the more an online publisher could charge. WSJ.com, for example, charges advertisers as much as $64.60 to show a banner ad to 1,000 viewers. (In advertising language, this is called CPM, or cost per thousand impressions.) In the past these fees made sense because The Wall Street Journal's readers are highly affluent, a perfect target for many upscale brands. The better the audience, the more advertisers are willing to pay for ad space.

But what if marketers could find new ways to reach the same audience—with ads on sites that won't charge nearly as much? What if those other ads cost as much as 95% less?

Profiling and Targeting Site Visitors

Online publishers face a big revenue squeeze as companies become more sophisticated in their ability to determine who is visiting what Web sites and when—just as marketers look to squeeze more from dwindling ad budgets.

The old online ad model is getting turned on its ear by such firms as ComScore (SCOR) and Quantcast. These and other upstarts specialize in such methods as so-called demographic profiling, which pinpoints the types of people visiting each Web site, and behavioral targeting, which helps advertisers reach a desired audience based on a person's past Web-surfing behavior.

Marketers can use these tools to reduce online ad costs dramatically. Say your company sells "Bidgets," a luxury product. Ordinarily you'd run banner ads on FancyOldSite.com, which reaches your target audience of men and women who earn more than $150,000 a year. The ads are expensive—say $60 per thousand impressions—but they reach your ideal audience.

You might instead embed a snippet of code in the banners that run on FancyOldSite.com. This places so-called cookies on the computers of everyone who sees the ad so you can track them when they visit other Web sites. That's where retargeting kicks in. Every time a former FancyOldSite.com reader who saw your ad visits other Web sites, your Bidget banner ads pop up again. The banner ads reappear because the cookie on that computer flags a retargeting "network" of thousands of sites, saying "This desirable reader is back." These new ads are cheap—$3 CPM—but they reach exactly the same audience.

Here Comes Google, via DoubleClick

Congratulations! You just used behavioral targeting to reduce your ad costs from $60 to $3 CPM, a 95% savings. (And yes, those cost quotes are based on real client experience.) Online targeting of individuals has been around for more than a decade, notes John Ardis, vice-president for corporate strategy at ValueClick (VCLK), another firm that specializes in online advertising. But interest has surged during the recession. "Obviously today's economy has advertisers looking to do more and more efficient things," he says. Not only are costs lower; results are often better. ValueClick, which provides retargeting, says click-through rates on such ads are 110% to 840% higher than average because they reach an audience more likely to be interested in a product or service.

Google (GOOG) is using its $3.2 billion acquisition of DoubleClick to get into the behavioral targeting game, using the data it monitors from millions of Web users to place more relevant ads. The size of the prize is significant; today Google has less than a 2% share of the $8 billion U.S. market for online display advertising, compared with its 63% share of the U.S. search market.

Quantcast is breaking some of the most interesting new ground in consumer targeting. Several services such as ComScore estimate Web audience demographics by using panels, or small, representative groups of people who agree to have their behavior tracked. Quantcast, however, makes 6 billion direct observations a day from cookies on computers that track the media habits of more than 900 million people worldwide. Quantcast then uses mathematical models to track the paths of consumers through millions of Web sites to determine, for instance, if you are a man age 35 to 44 with more than $100,000 in household income. The data is not individually identifiable—neither your name nor your address are collected—but the sheer size of the data set lets advertisers know exactly what type of people visit each Web site. This approach is relatively new. Quantcast launched its directly measured data service in 2006 and has been rapidly expanding it to new publishers.

And that's the rub. If you, an advertiser, know every Web site visited by your most desirable audience, you can find many ways to reach them other than through such marquee Web sites as WSJ.com (NWS), BusinessWeek.com (MHP), or that of The New York Times (NYT)—especially if the cost is lower. "Why would I pay $60 if I can pay $4?" asks Ardis of ValueClick. "There is really going to be a backlash. Newspapers felt it. Magazines felt it. There is a reckoning coming in online channels, too."

Publishers Can Use Data to Fight Back

But online publications don't have to go the way of newspapers—if they, too, learn to use the new customer data. "It will give them new and more innovative ways to sell the audience," says Quantcast Chief Marketing Officer Adam Gerber. Consider a site whose visitors are 80% male. In the past, that site may have attracted only advertisers who wish to reach men, leaving some inventory unsold. But with better data about readers, the site can now sell to a new set of advertisers the 20% of its space that attracts women.

Christine Peterson, president of 212, New York's Interactive Advertising Club, agrees that publishers can defend themselves. For example, they could charge an advertiser a premium if they can predict that readers are in the market for that advertiser's services. "Just because I looked at a financial page doesn't mean I'm ready to hear from Charles Schwab (SCHW)," she says. "But if I've been back and forth to multiple financial pages in recent days, could they charge Charles Schwab more? Yes."

The new, behavioral-targeted data could spur demand for online advertising. "We had a marketer who was launching a low-carb bread when Atkins and the South Beach diets were all the rage," Ardis notes. "They were targeting women—but it turned out a huge portion of those who signed up were men in their 40s who were starting to develop a little paunch." The advertiser started to spend more on advertising to reach the newly discovered male audience, he says.

So hope remains for online publishers: Find unsold segments of your readers and sell them to advertisers that previously couldn't access them. Use data on past reader "click streams" from other Web sites to help advertisers reach the consumers who are most interested in their products.

Publishers, your audience data is waiting. Advertisers want it. But you'd better hurry, because the price of your old online business model is falling fast.

Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet

238 Comments

by Eric Clemons on March 22, 2009

Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In it, he argues that the Internet shatters all forms of advertising. “The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed,” he writes. The views he expresses are his own, and we present them here to foster debate. (Obviously, we hope there is a place for advertising on the Internet since it pays our bills).

1. There Must Be Something Other Than Advertising:

The expected drop in internet advertising revenues this year was neither unpredictable nor unpredicted, nor was it caused solely by the general recession and the decline in retail sales. Internet advertising will rapidly lose its value and its impact, for reasons that can easily be understood. Traditional advertising simply cannot be carried over to the internet, replacing full-page ads on the back of The New York Times or 30-second spots on the Super Bowl broadcast with pop-ups, banners, click-throughs on side bars. This might be a subject where considerable disagreement is possible, if indeed, pushed ads were still working in traditional media. Mostly they have failed. One newspaper after another is going out of business across the United States, and the ad revenues of traditional print media, even of highly respected magazines, is declining. The ultimate failure of broadcast media advertising is likewise becoming clear.

Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites. This is particularly true when the consumer knows that the sponsor of the ad has paid to have this information, which was verified by no one, thrust at him. The net will find monetization models and these will be different from the advertising models used by mass media, just as the models used by mass media were different from the monetization models of theater and sporting events before them. Indeed, there has to be some way to create websites that do other than provide free access to content, some of it proprietary, some of it licensed, and some of it stolen, and funded by advertising.

The idea that content has a price and net applications should find ways to earn a profit without providing free access to other people’s content gets explosive reactions; when virtual reality pioneer and tech guru Jaron Lanier suggested in a New York Times Op Ed that authors deserved to be paid for their content he actually received death threats. But other models are possible and several suggestions for alternative forms of monetization are offered below.

2. Advertising will fail:

The internet is the most liberating of all mass media developed to date. It is participatory, like swapping stories around a campfire or attending a renaissance fair. It is not meant solely to push content, in one direction, to a captive audience, the way movies or traditional network television did. It provides the greatest array of entertainment and information, on any subject, with any degree of formality, on demand. And it is the best and the most trusted source of commercial product information on cost, selection, availability, and suitability, using community content, professional reviews and peer reviews.

My basic premise is that the internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it, and all the king’s horses, all the king’s men, and all the creative talent of Madison Avenue cannot put it together again. To analyze this statement we need a working definition of advertising, and I proposed the following, which is as general as I could make it:

Advertising is using sponsored commercial messages to build a brand and paying to locate these messages where they will be observed by potential customers performing other activities; these messages describe a product or service, its price or fundamental attributes, where it can be found, its explicit advantages, or the implicit benefits from its use.

It is frequently argued that the advertising industry will provide sufficient innovation to replace the loss of traditional ads on traditional mass media. Again, my basic premise rejects this, suggesting that simple commercial messages, pushed through whatever medium, in order to reach a potential customer who is in the middle of doing something else, will fail. It’s not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information. We will see the information we want, when we want it, from sources that we trust more than paid advertising. We will find out what we need to know, when we want to make a commercial transaction of any kind. The conventional wisdom is that this is exactly what paid search helps us to do, but all too often they are nothing more than a form of misdirection, as I explain further below. Instead, we will use information that we trust, obtained at the time that we want to see it.

Better targeting of ads using individual interests and individual behaviors will ensure that we do not bore or annoy as many people with each ad, but cannot address the trust issue. As for paid search, it is closer to other mechanisms that allow a website to sell access to potential customers. It works effectively as a revenue source for Google, of course. But it surely is not replicable for the average content website.

3. Advertising will fail for three reasons:

There are three problems with advertising in any form, whether broadcast or online:

• Consumers do not trust advertising. Dan Ariely has demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source have much lower credibility and much lower impact on the perception of product quality than the same message attributed to a rating service. Forrester Research has completed studies that show that advertising and company sponsored blogs are the least-trusted source of information on products and services, while recommendations from friends and online reviews from customers are the highest.
• Consumers do not want to view advertising. Think of watching network TV news and remember that the commercials on all the major networks are as closely synchronized as possible. Why? If network executives believed we all wanted to see the ads they would be staggered, so that users could channel surf to view the ads; ads are synchronized so that users cannot channel surf to avoid the ads.
• And mostly consumers do not need advertising. My own research suggests that consumers behave as if they get much of their information about product offerings from the internet, through independent professional rating sites like dpreview.com or community content rating services like Ratebeer.com or TripAdvisor

Yes, both network executives and their ad agencies have noted that we are not watching traditional ads, and they attribute this to the fact that we have moved beyond newspapers, televised network news, and broadcast movies, to video games, iPods, and the internet. Porting ads to a new medium will not solve the three problems noted above. The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed.

4. Alternative models for monetization are available:

Again, my research suggests that there are three general categories for creating value that can be monetized, including selling real things, selling virtual things, and selling access. Some websites exist solely to sell real things. Many of the best-known perform aggregation of demand, so that there will be enough customers to justify stocking and selling items for which there is only limited demand. Amazon is merely the best-known example. Sites like Amazon and Zappos are especially good for long tail items … where else do you go for a copy of the Green Sea of Heaven, Elizabeth T. Gray’s magnificent translation of the Ghazals of Hafiz, or for a pair of size 20 basketball shoes? Selling real things online has been studied since the advent of interest in eCommerce and will not be discussed further here. Other websites sell virtual things. These activities fall into three categories:

• Selling content and information, from digital music to news and information. Some of these sites are funded by subscriptions, like Gartner Research; some are by direct micropayments for purchases, like iTunes; and some currently attempt to fund themselves through advertising, like Business Week or The New York Times, while still searching for a more effective business model.
• Selling experience and participation in a virtual community, including Second Life and World of Warcraft, Facebook and MySpace, Flickr and YouTube, or LinkedIn. Not all of these have found a way to charge for participation.
• Selling accessories for virtual communities, like completed homes and stores, furnishings, clothing, and pets in Second Life or characters and accessories that would be difficult to earn in World of Warcraft, although this behavior is generally despised by serious World of Warcraft players.

Finally, some websites create and sell access to customers. Again, this can be divided into multiple categories.

• Misdirection, or sending customers to web locations other than the ones for which they are searching. This is Google’s business model. Monetization of misdirection frequently takes the form of charging companies for keywords and threatening to divert their customers to a competitor if they fail to pay adequately for keywords that the customer is likely to use in searches for the companies’ products; that is, misdirection works best when it is threatened rather than actually imposed, and when companies actually do pay the fees demanded for their keywords. Misdirection most frequently takes the form of diverting customers to companies that they do not wish to find, simply because the customer’s preferred company underbid. Misdirection also includes misinformation, such as telling a customer that a hotel is sold out when, indeed it is still available, if the hotel has chosen not to pay a promotional fee, and then allowing the guest to choose an alternative property. Misdirection is, regrettably, still a popular business model on the net, although for reasons I explored in an earlier TechCrunch post on Google it seems ultimately to be unsustainable. More significantly from the perspective of this post, it is not scalable; it is not possible for every website to earn its revenue from sponsored search and ultimately at least some of them will need to find an alternative revenue model.
• Evaluation, assessment, and validation. The opposite of sending a customer someplace other than where he wants is providing the customer enough information for him to make an informed choice on his own. Recommendations on TripAdvisor.com allow potential guests to evaluate and validate recommendations provided by Hotels.com; not surprisingly, Hotels.com originally owned TripAdvisor, and benefited greatly from it. Since Hotels.com did not attempt to influence or censor TripAdvisor content the website was (and is) trusted and helped put recommendations from Hotels.com at a level of trust comparable to those from an experienced travel agent. There are at present only a few other examples of website symbiosis like this, where community content on one site adds considerable value for another; consider also the relationship between the Beeryard’s list of new beers and Ratebeer.com, where clicking on the name of a newly arrived beer at the Beeryard will allow you to examine reviews on Ratebeer.com.
• Social search. Social search is a way of tailoring search based on the user’s network of friends. Rather than searching for any hotel in Chicago, or for any hotel that paid for the keywords “hotel” and “Chicago” I would like to be able to ask for the hotel where my friends stay when they are in Chicago. This invades no one’s privacy, avoids the annoyance of pushing ads at me when I am not searching for something to buy, and provides more relevant results than paid search usually can deliver. There are many problems with this, including the fact that my friends may not be on Facebook or other networks yet and those that are may not post their hotel or automobile or restaurant preferences. Most seriously, while it is clear how Microsoft might benefit from this, using its Facebook connection to undercut Google sponsored search, it is not clear how Microsoft or any other firm could monetize this directly.
• Contextual mobile ads. At present contextual mobile ads delivered by SMS appear to offer much promise. Imagine a hypothetical all-knowing information-based firm that (i) knows your location because you have registered to have the information from your in-phone GPS shared with your friends and (ii) knows that you like Thai restaurants because it monitors the content of your email and your online restaurant searches and (iii) knows that you are hungry because you just said so in a text message or Twitter post you sent from your phone. What a great time for them to text you an advertisement for a nearby Thai restaurant, sent directly to your phone. But why would you trust this? I remember when Hotels.com used to refer me to the same hotel, albeit at different prices, when I asked for a two-star or three-star hotel close to my office; I was never sure which was more amusing, the 80% price increase for the same hotel when I was willing to splurge on a three-star for my visitor, or the fact that there were comparable hotels 20 blocks closer to my office. I suspect that my hypothetical all-knowing firm will similarly be providing sponsored content; perhaps I will take a couple of additional seconds in order to find the restaurant I really want. This probably does not work as a form of advertising.

Of course no one knows yet, but if I had to guess, based on my meatspace experience, I would offer the following guesses for successfully monetizing the net in the future:

• Selling Virtual Things: People will pay for superior, timely, original content and for superior online experiences. Presently I willingly pay for the Financial Times, The Economist, and Foreign Affairs, I value the content, and, indeed, I feel I need it; I will continue to pay for them online. Perhaps I would not be willing to pay for archive material, which I expect that I would be able to find elsewhere, but I will cheerfully pay for the newest content online. Similarly, I willingly pay the cover change for my favorite jazz clubs in New York, and expect that I would cheerfully pay to participate in Second Life or World of Warcraft if, indeed, I had any interest in those virtual experiences. I guess, ultimately, if we compete for status through our purchases of accessories, clothes and homes in meatspace we will probably continue to purchase virtual accessories in Second Life, though I can’t say I fully understand this yet.
• Selling Access. Misdirection will fail totally and completely. I use a Mac, but I have abandoned Safari for Firefox. I have an iPhone and an iPod but I have never used the little white earbuds, preferring instead to purchase a pair of Shure E500 phones that I think sound vastly superior. Similarly, I would be equally happy to purchase a search service that worked for me, rather than accept a free one that works both against me and against the firms I patronize. In contrast, while people will continue to value community content and social search, these will be difficult to monetize. Finally, contextual mobile ads will, likewise be difficult to monetize. With information easily available, I will make my own restaurant choices, irrespective of those pushed at me via SMS, especially when I know that those pushed at me have been pushed for a fee, rather than based on an impartial assessment of my preferences. Yes, I can imagine SMS ads initially succeeding if they provide discounts, but ultimately this leads to little more than a bidding war for traffic and benefits no one other than the firm that provides the text messaging services. I can think of a few commercial SMS services that will benefit everyone, such as letting the most loyal guests of a restaurant know when it is still possible to get a reservation if they act immediately, eliminating the inefficiency of empty tables, but the restaurant will do this itself, using its email or cell phone contact lists. I don’t see this as advertising, or as being monetized by any intermediary. Of course, in an age before texting and email restaurants would have welcomed the all-knowing intermediary as the only mechanism available for communicating quickly with its most loyal customers. Now, restaurants have lists of their most loyal customers and can send out real time messages of interest. If the Blue Note were to text me on some night that I am in New York that it is still possible to get a table for two for Clark Terry, or Tria were to text me on a day when I was in Philadelphia that, surprisingly, there was no wait for an outdoor table right now, I’m sure I would respond to both. Of course there is no intermediary for this interaction, and this is more like direct communication than paid advertising.

The internet is about freedom, and I suspect that a truly free population will not be held captive and forced to watch ads. We always knew that freedom comes at a price; perhaps the price of internet freedom and the failure of ads will be paying a fair price for the content and the experience and the recommendations that we value.

Metrics Key for Winning in the Downturn

FEBRUARY 27, 2009

“Slash it!”

With the economy struggling and budgets being reduced, US marketers are focusing on quantifiable tactics to get their messages across.

iMedia found that the majority of marketers were dedicating their firms to measurable, ROI-driven strategies. While some were keeping plans the same, even fewer were abandoning new marketing initiatives.

“With the current economic recession, digital marketing professionals are holding out hope that some of the budget dollars originally slated for traditional marketing will move into the cheaper, more measurable digital medium,” wrote iMedia analysts.

What is preventing marketing executives from moving more funding into the online space?

Respondents to the survey said that dependence on traditional measures, corporate culture, departmental inertia or fear and a lack of metrics were the largest roadblocks to further allocation.

Metrics Key for Winning in the Downturn

FEBRUARY 27, 2009

“Slash it!”

With the economy struggling and budgets being reduced, US marketers are focusing on quantifiable tactics to get their messages across.

iMedia found that the majority of marketers were dedicating their firms to measurable, ROI-driven strategies. While some were keeping plans the same, even fewer were abandoning new marketing initiatives.

“With the current economic recession, digital marketing professionals are holding out hope that some of the budget dollars originally slated for traditional marketing will move into the cheaper, more measurable digital medium,” wrote iMedia analysts.

What is preventing marketing executives from moving more funding into the online space?

Respondents to the survey said that dependence on traditional measures, corporate culture, departmental inertia or fear and a lack of metrics were the largest roadblocks to further allocation.

Online Ad Spending Seen Shrinking

Internet advertising could fall by 5% in the first quarter of 2009, the first contraction in online ad spending since the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, market research group IDC said Wednesday.

IDC analyst Karsten Weide also said the U.S. Internet ad market could get worse in the second quarter before the situation improves in the second half of the year.

Mr. Weide said his latest estimates suggest the low double-digit growth rates that most industry forecasts assume for 2009 may be too optimistic. IDC itself had previously forecast a 10% growth in online ads for 2009.

The research group's estimates highlight the challenges that Internet giants Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. face as their core revenue streams continue to deteriorate amid a deepening global recession.

Mr. Weide said IDC's revised outlook reflects results from the group's upcoming fourth quarter Internet ad report. It concludes that while world-wide Internet ad spending continued to grow at a muted pace, fourth-quarter U.S. Internet advertising sales were much worse than anticipated -- up just 0.4% to $7.13 billion.

Mr. Weide said growth in fourth-quarter search ads was only barely able to offset losses in display and classified spending. He forecast that while first-quarter search ad revenue will not collapse, growth will continue slowing -- and display and classified ads will most likely show worse declines than in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Google's dominance of the search advertising market has made it more resilient to the downturn than struggling Yahoo, which depends much more on display advertising.

Internet Recession Watch: Google Sees Ad Cutbacks

from Silicon Alley Insider by Henry Blodget

New Item: Google reports anecdotal advertiser cutbacks from mortgage crisis (though not on Google). This is the first acknowledgment by a major media company that some advertisers are cutting back. Earlier this week, CBS and Viacom said they had seen no signs of cutbacks. Timeline of data points below.

Summary. We continue to believe that we may be in the first stages of a cyclical downturn for advertising and the Internet sector--one that will affect not only start-ups and second-tier players but majors like Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), AOL, et al. Such downturns do not begin suddenly, and they are not instantly obvious (except in hindsight). Rather, as with the housing market, the environment changes gradually, over many months, with early signs slowly becoming a steady torrent of bad news.

For the past two months, we have been tracking and analyzing data points that we believe could be early warning signs (along with some offsetting, positive ones)...

Taken together, we believe these signs paint a clearer picture of the changing environment. It's always possible that this will be a "blip," but these cycles usually take years, not months, to play out. So we think it's smart to expect tougher times ahead.

Recommendations/Ramifications

Sep 18: NY VC Fred Wilson: The Coming Downturn
Aug 17: Dear Internet Industry: Brace for harder times
Aug 17: What happens to Yahoo, Google, et al, in recessions?
Aug 1: The market's crashing: Are you recession proof?

Timeline

Sep 20: Google reports anecdotal advertiser cutbacks from mortgage crisis (though not on Google)

Sep 18: NY VC Fred Wilson: The Coming Downturn

Sep 14: First online ad estimate cut for mortgage crisis.
Sep 13: Countrywide gets life support, but we still worry about online ads.
Sep 12: Ad network Burst Media reports cancellations from "budget constraints"
Sep 11: Mortgage giant Countrywide fires 12,000, WaMu sees "perfect storm"
Sep 11: TNS reports two quarters of decline in US ads--first since 2001.
Sep 10: Online mortgage ads remain strong in August: Good sign or false signal?

Sep 6: Countrywide crumble and stock foreshadows Yahoo, Google, et al?
Sep 5: OpCo "cautiously optimistic" about mortgage mess. We're cautiously pessimistic.

Aug 30: How Bad Could Mortgage Mess Get for Google, Yahoo, et al
Aug 29: Will mortgage crisis hurt web ads? Sure looks that way.
Aug 29: Bankrate CEO call provides more reason to worry about online ads.
Aug 27: Cracks in Manhattan's commercial real-estate market?
Aug 22: JupiterMedia CEO Meckler says every Internet company now for sale.

Aug 17: Dear Internet Industry: Brace for harder times
Aug 17: What happens to Yahoo, Google, et al, in recessions?
Aug 16: About that crashing stock market
Aug 3: Bankrate confirms online ad market strong, print weak
Aug 1: The market's crashing: Are you recession proof?

July 20: Google blows up the stock market