Stop, look, listen! We've been breached. I say "we" loosely because I THINK I'm still "on the winning side" as I'll explain shortly.
But first see this:
Quote:
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We all know online advertising decelerated in the third quarter, but how bad was the slowdown overall? To find out, we added up the online advertising revenues for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL, which together account for the majority of online advertising. In the third quarter, growth pretty much ground to a halt. The combined ad revenues of those four Web bellwethers eked out only 0.6 percent growth, quarter over quarter. That sequential growth rate was 12.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007, to 2.8 percent in the first quarter of 2008, and 1.1 percent in the second quarter
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(source: site pro news)
Anyway - first the figures -
in short Google's advertising revenue growth, google and its little gang of friends and enemies, has gone from 12.7% to 0.6% in the last 12 months and within a few more months will be, I strongly believe, in negative growth, aka shrinking
as advert revenue is google's most natural income, this means Google is up that creek without that paddle
So, what did the author overlook and get wrong? That word "majority" - Google and its gang control a LOT of advertising, maybe indeed a majority, 60% would be a majority that left open a HUGE chunk of people who the article hasn't considered properly
As far as I have seen affiliate marketing increased its annual rate of growth in the first half of 2008 - I read in one place that it grew by 15%
So while google and its enemies and friends (its gang) have fallen, other advertising sellers have been soaring. Why?
Google and its friend/enemies use bid-centric advertising whereas the affiliate networks use performance-based costing, so that the latter is a more longterm, sensible and powerful business model. Any major blue chip organisation that is in retailing spends much more of its budget on affiliate advertising than google. Google and its friends have been propped up for the last 5 years by the liquidity-brigade. The credit crash / bank crash HAS therefore finally caught up.
You can be sure that within 3 months, after christmas figures set in, google will take a dive. Yahoo will be swept away quite fast now I bet. But the main thing is that the affiliate sector does seem to be getting stronger and stronger and its growth rate prediction for 2012 remains very positive as a sector.
Does anyone else have figures and information regarding the affiliate sector's boom and growth and general position? That's what would help corroborate these immensely interesting finds.
