Internet Advertising comparison

I recently came across this article Advertising follows eyeballs to the Internet
Aug 6 2008 from The Canadian Press, Which states that advertising follows eyeballs, and they've been moving to the Internet.

The reach of online advertising is growing as consumers, especially younger ones, move online for content and consumption. Yes, only the older folks are staying on the printed version. One is because its a habit. The younger ones do not have a reference point and that's why they are moving to the Internet.

But how to gauge the success of online ads?

It's not just about measuring mouse clicks that result in purchases via the Internet, said Andrew Lipsman of U.S.-based ComScore, which studies ways the Internet is used.

The bigger impact is building a product's brand online and affecting consumers' behaviour offline, he said from Chicago.

The average number of online ads viewed by an Internet user in the United States is 1,762 a month, Lipsman said. This number doesn't include any online ads seen on mobile phones. No Canadian statistics were available from ComScore.

"People are beginning to understand how these online ad exposures do have a brand-building impact. And as they begin to see the value in that and get out of the mindset it's all about direct response and purchasing something online right now, more dollars will begin to shift online."

Yahoo, AOL and MSN and social networking site MySpace are market leaders in serving up display ads, Lipsman said.

Google's share of this market is smaller, he said.

But Google has "a much larger share of the paid search (ad) market" - these are ads that appear along with websites on a page of search results.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada says online advertising revenues climbed to just more than $1.2 billion in 2007.

As for consumers' privacy concerns, Gignac said: "If we make those eyeballs less trusting, they won't come to your site and then they can't be reached by advertisers."

Gignac's organization is predicting online revenue will increase to $1.5 billion this year.

Marc Tellier, president and CEO of Yellow Pages Group, said yellowpages.ca has been online for 10 years and reaches 41 per cent of all Canadian web users in a given month, or about 9.7 million people monthly.

"That positions us as the eighth most-visited (online) destination in Canada," Tellier said. "We're looking at $214 million in Internet revenue annualized. By 2010, online should reach about 20 per cent of our revenues. It's a growing category."

In Singapore, Internet is fast gaining ground also amongst the young. The yellow pages print reported flat revenue and thereby Internet is the growth oppotunity to bring the Singapore Yellow Pages revenue up to where it was before.