Online Advertising: Too Many Ad Pages, Too Few Ads

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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r218533_8550254Internet display advertising is being challenged by the recession. Traditional media is not the only business being hurt as marketers curtail spending to save money.

Barry Diller recently said that the display advertising at the sites his company controls was down 50% in January.

Now big internet sites are up against a by-product of their own success.  Their advertising inventory is rising at double-digit rates.  But, there are no clients to buy those impressions.

Yahoo!, Microsoft’s (MSFT) MSN, Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL, and the large websites controlled by News Corp (NWS), Viacom (VIA), and NBC could see their display advertising revenue fall by 30% or more in the current quarter.

According to The Wall Street Journal, “Yahoo’s network of sites attracted 146 million unique U.S. visitors in January, by comparison. Such scale can still be a draw for big advertisers.”

Online advertising is starting to look like the newspaper business.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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