Re: How much advertising is there?

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.hodgkingmail.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