Papers’ Web Hopes Dim a Bit
The Web is changing the whole nature of marketing. The visual and imagistic is in decline; the useful and functional is on the rise. Google is the biggest brand in the world. It makes most of its revenue from advertising, and yet it has never sold a visual ad–only text ads.
Even with the growth in broadband, the simple text search ad is on the rise. The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2007:
Underlining this pressure is a shift under way within Internet advertising. The ad formats that have so far proved strongest for newspapers — banner ads, pop-ups and listings — are losing ground to formats such as search marketing. Ad buyers say automotive, entertainment, financial-services and travel companies — all major newspaper advertisers in print and online — are aggressively shifting dollars into search marketing.
