Re: How much advertising is there?

["B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2@yahoo.com>]

I agree with Adam on this...

In a sense it's a whole new ball game out there, and there will 
be a lot of experimenting going on as others are bitten by the 
Google bug.

In my earlier comments I did not mean to imply that I thought 
every content provider might go this route. No doubt there may be 
many content providers and publishers who feel they need to stick 
with subscriptions to survive. I simply meant that more and more 
content is likely to be available at no charge, meaning people 
will feel that they need libraries even less than they already 
do.

Bernie Sloan

adam hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com> wrote:

On the other hand advertising is getting much, much smarter and
Google is at the leading edge of that. Web-based
subscription-only businesses are on the whole getting less smart
-- since it seems that publishers and aggregators can only offer
an *aggregation model* for (not very efficient) access management
to subscriptions.

If consolidation is the only game the subscription publishers can
offer, these access models will become increasingly ungainly and
will inevitably lose market share to open access models which can
leverage the value of a database of intentions across a domain of
highly differentiated content. The global advertising markets are
already vastly bigger than the markets for paid information
services and there is a tendency for paid information services to
slide to an Open Access model if that is a way of enlarging the
scope for advertising reach. The Elsevier/Oncology and NYT moves
of the last two weeks are both signs of that.....

As to the size of the advertising market relative to that for
information or content subscription services. The globabl
advertising and promotion markets are measured in the low
trillions $USD, and the total markets for electronic and print
subscription information services (STM, financial and legal) is
tiny in comparison.

I would suggest that there is still quite a lot to play for in
the growth of global advertising markets.

adam