Ad Age's 2006 Interactive Fact Pack is available. With blogs and RSS feeds coming in as official media categories for the first time (e.g. Blogger.com has a 528% increase in traffic vs. the previous year), alternative media takes a position front-and-center in this 2006 Interactive Marketing & Media Report from AdAge.
Some exhilirating new media facts:
- MySpace is in the top 10 most-trafficked sites at #8 (right behind Amazon.com)
- There's not much data [yet] on consumer-generated content
- RSS feed content is garnering small media buying dollars, but growing (but as you'll see RSS data is surprisingly laced throughout the entire fact pack - indicating huge future potential for the category)
- Projected 2006 spending on Paid Search =40%; Display/Banners = 20%
- 70% of media & communications companies said they were going to include blogs and social networks into their future marketing efforts - not too bad.
- In-house blogs = 35% of marketers will spend their budgets to develop them
- As for marketers driving their media budgets toward ad placements on third party blogs and blog networks = 30%: again, not bad.
- Blogger.com is the #1 used tool for blogging.
- Vonage still holds #1 online advertiser/media buyer positioning.
- The telecommunications industry is still the biggest spender online for customer acquisition and branding purposes.
- **Most interesting online media planner factoid: 78% of RSS feed users are male.
- **Request for the 2007 Ad Age Report: Given the huge paid search category, include a new blogosphere metric called "Earned Search" - like the new R.O.B. (the personal "Return on Blogging" metric), "Earned Search" should be a new corporate blogging metric which would include SEO (search engine optimization) and corporate blogging efforts tied together. Remember, business blogging is part of the public relations mix and is thus earned media. (It's time we start actually measuring earned media online to provide corporate blogging efforts an R.O.I., or an R.O.B. - a Return On Blogging.)






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