Jun 2, 2009

Online and Newspaper Advertising Revenue Plummets in 2009

Gary Eckstein Internet 0 adsense, advertisers, advertising revenue, advertising revenues, adverts, aol, cost per click, cpc, google, google adwords, google search engine, newspaper advertising, newspaper association of america, online advertising, pay per click, print advertising, search advertising, search engine marketing, search engine results, sem, yahoo

The Newspaper Association of America has reported that online advertising revenue for the 2009 first quarter is down 13.4% compared to the same period of 2008. Print advertising revenue is down just under 30% for the same quarter. For the same year on year comparison Google’s revenue from its Pay per Click (PPC) service called Adwords increased 17% from 2008.

So, newspapers advertising revenues are plummeting both in printed and online formats however the big search advertising player, Google, is flourishing with search advertising revenues bounding along very nicely. This is not the full story about online search advertising; AOL ad revenues fell 20% during Q1 2009 and Yahoo’s search ad revenue fell 3%.

What some of us Search Engine Marketing (SEM) consultants are noticing is that the Cost per Click (CPC) for Google Adwords is increasing fairly substantially. In plain English this means that it is getting more expensive to advertise on the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Google search advertising revenues may be increasing but is this because of more clicks on adverts or is this because advertisers are paying more?