Even uglier on the advertising front

By Joshua Benton @jbenton Jan. 21, 2009, 9:32 a.m.

Remember Nick Denton’s doom-mongering predictions of a coming major decline in online advertising? And how the most optimistic point in the evidence he used to back his claim was, as our Zach Seward put it:

…that search advertising continues to grow, both in CPM (how much advertisers pay per thousand impressions) and share of online advertising.

In other words, the argument goes, banner ads and online classifieds may be headed south, but at least search advertising — the text ads that power the bottom line of Google and others — will be okay.

Well, along comes the Wall Street Journal with the bad news: Even search advertising was down eight percent in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Joshua Benton is the senior writer and former director of Nieman Lab. You can reach him via email (joshua_benton@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@jbenton).

POSTED Jan. 21, 2009, 9:32 a.m.

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