August 10, 2004

The growth rate for paid advertising search revenues will significantly slow in the next six years, said JupiterResearch on Monday. But that doesn't mean it's going away.

Paid search will continue to grow faster than any other sector of online advertising, increasing from $2.6 billion in 2004 to $5.5 billion in 2009, according to Nate Elliott and Niki Scevak, lead analysts on the research firm's new report.

That growth, however, is likely to be spurred by price increases. "A sharp increase in the average cost-per-click is the primary driver of this market, with incremental growth in the number of searches also driving spending," the report said.

Some analysts interpret this as bad news for Google , whose revenues have soared as it capitalized on the paid search business. Analyst Elliott said the paid search market is "maturing" and that Google has to know that. "They need to diversify," he told Reuters. While best known as a search engine, Google has other services including a comparison shopping service and recently-launched e-mail.

Microsoft has begun offering a version of its MSN Messenger which can be used from any Internet-connected PC. Similar to instant messaging clients from America Online and Yahoo , MSN Web Messenger lets users send instant text message even though they are not on MSN and may be using corporate or public computers. The new program is available at http://webmessenger.msn.com/

The grandfather of alternative newspapers has recently cut its staff about 10 percent as it competes with the newest alternative medium, the Internet. One of the dozen or so staffers recently let go by the Village Voice is Matt Haber, hired five months ago as the newspaper's online managing editor, according to The New York Times.

The Voice's advertising revenues "could be better" according to Judy Miszner, the publisher, with online media such as Craigslist.com reportedly getting some of the classified advertising dollars the Voice used to own.

"The restructuring is tied into our efforts going from a weekly product to, with the Web, daily journalism electronically," she also told The Times. "We're putting stuff up on a daily basis, sometimes on an hourly basis." She said new resources are being focused for the online presence.

A new book about American journalism will report that online reporters are more liberal, Democratic, and better paid than reporters for traditional media.

"Online journalists were more likely (47 percent) than journalists in general (32 percent), to consider themselves 'a little to the left'," said David H. Weaver, a journalism professor at Indiana University in Bloomington.

He is a co-author of the forth-coming book, "The American Journalist in the 21st Century." The study also found that the median income for online journalists is "significantly higher" than that of traditional print and broadcast reporters. Job satisfaction is also higher than for print reporters, he said, according to a report about the book in Editor & Publisher.

Amazon.com has begun publishing a Web log targeted at people who like new gadgets and gizmos. It's a blog of blogs. In a section of the retailer's site aimed at "early adopters", the company is publishing Blogcast, "interesting blog posts from all over the web".

It's a combination of announcements about new products and snippets from news stories about technology. Blogcast has a small universe of resources. It's deriving all its content from two other tech blogs: Engadget and Gizmodo.com.

Source: Always On.com

        

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