Xigaware

You and everyone else in the world has heard about the big tumble in marketing online: profits falling, companies are pulling back, people are understanding how hard it is to advertise online. Hold on: that’s 2001.

Ah, Those Dot-Com Days

You probably recall that time as the dot-com bust. It was difficult for everybody, everyone who placed their hopes on specific things, but from one vantage point it couldn’t be avoided. There were too many gigantic promises getting trumped up on a foundation that wasn’t really solid, so a big drop was unavoidable.

But then, after the whole mess, people concluded in haste that online advertising was buried, which meant the foundation collapsed under the developing marketplace that was still kicking around. This really just allowed Google to move in and pick up gigantic chunks of the online ad market, which allowed them to become far more dominant than any other company.

Why AdWords and AdSense Suddenly Took Over

Slowly, the market returned, grew at a reasonable pace, SEO was born again, and a new honeymoon began again with online marketing. There was a little more caution in the air.

Jump forward to 2008/2009 and the financial mess. Advertising spots dropped precipitously. Advertising budgets were slashed. And when a company, trying to tighten its belt, cuts its marketing budget, what is the first to go? Newspaper buys? TV? Nah. Try ’search engine optimization’ and ‘new media’ ads in general.

Please Don’t Tell Me It’s Crashed Again, Mom

To the untrained eye (or the writer who doesn’t get the whole story), this looks like a big crash in online marketing. But where many viewed, just like before, the second death of an industry, anyone who looked harder could see that this simply wasn’t the case.

The truth is that advertising online experienced a fall like everything else, but the final arrival point to read content will be (for some time) the internet. Just because advertising sank doesn’t mean users stopped using the internet in droves. The opposite took place.

Where Do People Get Their Information?

In truth, as we finish our first decade of the 2000s, we’re finding even more catastrophic drops in newspaper readership and TV viewership. And now books are under threat from devices like Amazon’s kindle. Apple is about to likely release an entire new genre of touch-screen product constructed entirely for browsing and online content. People are definitely going online for their content fix.

This only tells us that the online ad market is clearly going to keep growing as more markets that are actually viable emerge. So while there has been a little crash in ads online, and here and there it’s clearly quite heavy, there are explanations for it that have nothing to do with whether or not the market for online advertising is feasible or not.

There Has Never Been A More Opportune Period Than Right Now

Times are tough. Large agencies have cut down their online advertising, rates are lower than ever, and still each day the analytics, the SEO Agency, doing an excellent job—every one of these factors is on the increase.

Are you going to be someone that hides during a recession, waiting for heavy security before doing anything? Or are you constantly looking for advantages, constantly trying to see where the market is going and re-energizing at the most opportune moment, when ad rates and the market are perfect for it?

Don’t be tricked by the illusion of a ‘catastrophic fall’ in online advertising. Look at the long game, understand where it’s going, and be successful.

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