Paid advertising on the internet is now a massive and truly global business, and with every passing day it just keeps on getting bigger. For example, in the first quarter of 2006, internet advertising revenues reached a new high of $3.9 billion and by the end of the third quarter of the same year, this figure had gone past $4 billion. However, in the same Q3 period in 2007, internet advertising revenues surpassed $5.2 billion, setting another new high and continuing the trend of record breaking quarters that has been a constant ever since the Internet Advertising Bureau started keeping records back in 1996.
With the ever-increasing worldwide popularity of the internet, this is probably only what you would expect. Nevertheless, moving from $4 billion to $5.2 billion dollars in one year indicates a phenomenal rate of growth, indicating that more and more businesses are willing to commit ever more substantial proportions of their advertising budgets to promoting their businesses online in order to get their name and products in front of an increasingly discerning internet-connected global audience.
And, as they have done for the last few years, Google continue to monopolize and dominate the online advertising industry with their preeminent advertising programs AdWords and AdSense. This also continues a trend that was initially established when Google revolutionized web publishing and advertising by turning personal blogs, websites and forums into potential revenue generating centers for individual webmasters, whilst at the same time setting new standards for effective and affordable targeted promotion and advertising.
Both of Google’s phenomenally successful programs operate on the basis of what is known as the Pay Per Click (PPC) or sometimes the Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising business model. In simple terms, using PPC involves a website or blog publisher agreeing to carry AdSense ads on their site, whilst an advertiser who is looking to promote their products online approaches Google through the AdWords program. Google then places these ads alongside relevant Google search engine results, as well as on targeted websites and blogs.
For example, if an advertiser is selling automobile products, then their adverts will only appear alongside automobile related search results and on websites and blogs that focus on matters pertaining to cars or automobiles. As suggested above, the internet advertising industry is huge, and Google owns a very significant chunk of that market. You can therefore work out for yourself that they must be earning phenomenal amounts of money from the AdWords and AdSense programs.
And yet, it is known that Google are now actively looking at introducing other forms of promotion to their advertising business portfolio, which of course raises the question of why it would be doing so, and what types of advertising are they most actively interested in?
And this is not some idle rhetorical or ‘for interest only’ question. What Google decides to do in the online advertising market, you can almost inevitably guarantee everyone will eventually do. Therefore, knowing why Google are doing what they are doing, and the direction that they are moving in should give any savvy internet marketer or online business entrepreneur a clear insight into where online advertising is likely to go over the next two or three years.
This, in turn, should enable anyone who is in this situation to position their business to be able to maximize the received advertising revenues as the market continues to develop.