Jason Calacanis‘ story of the trends of advertising 2.0

Jason Calacanis writes about the „real story“ of Advertising 2.0:

The real story of Web 2.0 has little to do with the bells and whistles and everything to do with the stunning growth of online advertising.

He provides a graph with online ad spent per year since 1997 and puts a straight line from ’97 until today, which is, of course, a steep, straight line. (I hope he doesn’t analyse his real money investments the same way!)

He also doesn’t think that the spike over the past year is another bubble, but instead says that the curve is just getting steeper in future, for the following reasons:

a) there are more advertisers online today.
b) it’s getting easier to spend money online
c) Google Adsense/Adwords (a huge part of part B above)
d) Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Google reaching scale, which in turn allows major advertisers to reach comparable audience sizes to TV
e) audiences shifting from TV, radio, and magazines to the Internet.

All of these seem plausible. Of course one might say: „we thought the same back then in 2000, just for different reasons“, but Jason also shows a second graph with a line ca. 15% less steep, which still is impressive. He suggests to believe the long-term hype and I agree.

Growth rates are probably going to be huge for while. Not necessarily because the medium is more attactive than others (though I think it is at least for some purposes), but purely because there still is a long way to go, until the medium is an everyday medium like the other media – both for the broad audience and for marketers.

(via)