Internet Ad Revenue Up 15.2% in First Half of 2008

Internet advertising revenues for the first six months of 2008 were $11.5 billion, setting a new half-year record that represents a 15.2% increase over the first half of 2007, according to recently released data from The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) andPricewaterhouseCoopers.

The IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report also shows a Q2 increase of 12.8% over the same period in 2007 and shows a slight decline of 0.3% from the first quarter.

Search- and display-related advertising also reached all-time highs. Search revenues totaled nearly $5.1 billion for the first six months of 2008, up 24% from $4.1 billion for the same period in 2007.

Display-related advertising totaled nearly $3.8 billion for first six months of 2008, compared with $3.2 billion for the same period in 2007, roughly a 19% increase. Display-related advertising includes display banner ads, rich media, digital video, and sponsorship.

“Interactive advertising continues to demonstrate year-over-year growth as marketers and consumers increase their embrace of digital media,” said Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the IAB. “The essentially flat performance we see quarter to quarter reflects in part cyclical advertising trends. Compared to the trajectory in other media and in the general economy, interactive has outperformed because it delivers a level of accountability unmatched by any other advertising medium.”

About the report: The IAB research was conducted by the New Media Group of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Launched in  1996, it aggregates data from all companies that report meaningful online advertising revenues and includes data about online advertising revenues from websites, commercial online services, ad networks, free email providers, and all other companies selling online advertising.

STATS: Top 100 US Media Revenues, 2007

Revenue Growth Slowest Since 2001

Media100′S Net U.S. Media Revenue Rises 4.6%, Nearing $300 Billion

By Bradley Johnson 

Published: September 29, 2008

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) — The nation’s top 100 media companies saw a 4.6% revenue boost in 2007, their slowest growth since the recession year of 2001. 

Media’s tempered growth mirrors that of the economy: GDP last year recorded its most tepid growth (2%) since 2002 amid signs the economy was heading into recession. 

Media’s biggest winner is no surprise: digital, with revenue up 10.8%. Cable-network growth was close behind, at 10.6%. The biggest loser: newspapers, down 6.8%. 

2008 Special Report: Media Family Tree  Media Companies’ Data Charts  Ad Age’s Media 100 List Gives Glimpse of a New Order  DataCenter This Week: Media Loses Nearly 20,000 Jobs

The nation’s 100 Leading Media Companies pulled in 2007 net U.S. media revenue of $299.1 billion, including money from advertising, subscriptions and fees. 

Time Warner still on top
Time Warner topped the list with net U.S. media revenue of $35.6 billion. Time Warner, which has held the No. 1 spot each year since 1995, collected 11.9% of Media 100 revenue — nearly one of every eight dollars spent by advertisers and consumers on products and services from the top 100. 

Time Warner is likely to lose its position as the nation’s largest media company. The company is preparing to spin off its biggest operating segment, Time Warner Cable, as a wholly separate company. Time Warner minus its cable systems had 2007 net U.S. media revenue of about $21 billion. That would make it the second-largest U.S. media firm, behind Comcast Corp. ($26.9 billion). 

Ad Age has published the 100 Leading Media Companies report since 1981. In that first report, the top 100 had U.S. media revenue of $29.5 billion, one-tenth the revenue of this year’s Media 100. 

The Media 100 offers a bottom-up view of media by tallying revenue from an array of products and services. This includes traditional media, internet services, cable providers and movies. Revenue sources include advertising, subscriptions, sales of movie tickets and DVDs, and fees from TV production/licensing. …

Report: Big Media Growth Slowest Since 2001. And That Was Last Year…

Peter Kafka | September 29, 2008 8:53 AM

Ad Age tallies up the 100 biggest media companies in the U.S. and concludes that their American revenue grew just 4.6% in 207 - the slowest rate since 2001. 

Yahoo Overhauls System for Selling Display Ads

Yahoo formally launches its ad network

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 12:44 pm

Yahoo on Wednesday formally christened its new ad network, dubbed APT.

The ad exchange, which was formally known as AMP!, is aiming to streamline the display ad buying process by boiling planning and optimizing down to a dashboard. The platform is being rolled out in phases with the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News as the first customers.

APT is an important initiative for Yahoo as it tries to close its monetization gap with Google. With APT, Yahoo is trying to bring more efficiency to display ads and better monetize remnant inventory and better cross sell.

In a statement, Yahoo said APT has “the potential to allow unprecedented ease of cross-selling across the largest open network of publishers, advertisers, ad networks and agencies from a single integrated interface.”

Also see: Odds for Yahoo-AOL deal may increase

That’s a fancy way of saying Yahoo is rolling up ad buys into a dashboard that looks like this:

Yahoo already has a captive audience via its partnerships with hundreds of newspapers, but the big question is whether the exchange holds up over time. Google with its DoubleClick acquisition is looking to bring similar efficiencies to the display ad market.

Yahoo Overhauls System for Selling Display Ads

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Published: September 24, 2008

Yahoo announced on Wednesday the details about its system to buy and sell display advertising online, with the hope that the company can dominate the display ad market in the same way Google steers the search market.

Enlarge This Image

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

William Dean Singleton of MediaNews, left, Sue Decker, president of Yahoo, and Jerry Yang, chief of Yahoo, on Wednesday.

Related

Times Topics: Yahoo! Inc.

The new platform, called APT, will allow both publishers and advertisers to manage display advertising across the Web sites of several hundred newspapers across the country, along with Yahoo sites and large sites like eBayand WebMD.

At an event at Advertising Week in New York, executives said that the 800 or so members of Yahoo’s newspaper consortium would be using the system, formerly known as AMP, by the end of the year.

For advertisers, the new system would simplify the buying of display ads. Currently, advertisers typically buy display advertising from individual sites, or use ad networks, where they do not always control where their ads appear. If the platform develops as Yahoo promised, it would allow newspapers to make more money from online advertising. National advertisers do not want to make hundreds of tiny purchases, and the APT platform would make member newspapers’ Web site space available to national advertisers through one national purchase.

It would also let publishers use Yahoo’s targeting capabilities for ads on their sites, and use the demographic and behavioral information Yahoo has about users to show them appropriate ads. That “allows us to charge more” for the advertising space, said William Dean Singleton, the chief executive of the MediaNews Group, at the event.

Publishers can also allow Yahoo and other newspapers to sell their ad space as long as it meets a minimum price. For example, if a publisher knows his sales force can get $1 per thousand impressions on a certain ad unit, he might allow partners to sell it if they can get $1.25 or higher.

The San Jose Mercury News and The San Francisco Chronicle have been testing the system, and the next users will be Cox Newspapers, the MediaNews Group and Scripps Newspapers. In 2009, Yahoo will offer APT to advertisers, agencies and advertising networks…

Google: See, Our Ad Deal With Yahoo Is Harmless (GOOG, YHOO)

Vasanth Sridharan | September 25, 2008 2:00 PM

Google, in its quest to convince people that its search ad deal with Yahoo is a good thing for the industry — and not a monopoly over search — has launched a fact site detailing exactly how the deal will work.

The antitrust pitch we’ve heard before, but the interesting thing Google lays out in a 17-page slideshow, embedded below, is exactly how the ads will look. Google also explains how the deal compares to allegedly similar deals in other industries.

The message Google’s hoping to express is still the same: this deal is not anticompetitive. But here, like before, Google isn’t saying that ad prices won’t go up:

Google does not set the prices manually for ads; rather, advertisers themselves determine prices through an ongoing competitive auction. We have found over years of research that an auction is by far the most efficient way to price search advertising and have no intention of changing that…

Yahoo Fat Farm: How Many People Does Yahoo Need To Fire To Get “Fit”?

Henry Blodget | September 25, 2008 2:02 PM

Yahoo’s fat as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. So they’ve hired Bain...

Yahoo’s Right Media ad exchange was so broken some turned it off

After Yahoo confirmed it has been experiencing problems with latency at its Right Media exchange on Monday, I’ve heard from those at ad networks using RXM, verifying latency issues were widespread. How bad was it? One Right Media client actually turned off Right Media exchange for a period until latency issues improved. It’s not clear if the problems have been fixed for everyone yet, though, or what the problems were. As of this writing, Yahoo hasn’t responded to my request for comment…

Spark’s Koyfman Looking For The Next Winner In Advertising Monetization

Spark’s New VC Koyfman, Like Everyone Else, Looking For The Next Winner In Advertising

Boston-based VC firm Spark Capital has already made plenty of bets on tech and media companies that plan to use advertising for some or all of their revenue, including Veoh, KickApps, I’minlikewithyou, 5min, Twitter, and Tumblr. One problem: The advertising business hasn’t caught up to many of the startups, who find themselves light on revenue or unburdened by it altogether.

Enter Spark’s newest partner, former IAC exec Moshe “Mo” Koyfman, who says he’s on the hunt for interesting companies that can help move the online ad business beyond Google.

“There’s been lots of innovation on the content and media side,” he says, “but we’ve yet to see some of the innovation required to monetize appropriately.”

Web video is one of the fields that could desperately use better revenue generators, and no one knows that better than Koyfman, whose last job was running IAC’s (IACI) Connected Ventures, including video sharing site Vimeo.

Koyfman says at Spark, he’ll be looking for companies that have a unique or scalable approach to making ad money better “in a market that has shown dramatically how to lower costs of creation, but not monetization.”

LinkedIn To Launch Its Own Ad Network

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

At a time when most social networks are still trying to figure out how to make money from advertising, one social network is bucking the trend. LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals, has so much demand from advertisers that it will be launching its own ad network on Monday. In conjunction with ad network Collective Media (which targets high-end media sites), LinkedIn will let other select sites target its users when they visit those partner sites.

Most social networks have a hard time selling ads at more than $1 CPMs (cost per thousand impressions), but LinkedIn’s rate card shows display ads starting at $30 CPMs and going up to $76.50. Text ads range from $12 to $20 CPMs. Even with the regular discounting from the rate card that many advertisers might recieve, LinkedIn is still doing much better than most social networks. That is because it has a more desirable audience that advertisers want to reach…