Internet advertising wanes in 08

“The economy has had a significant impact on the short-term growth of the Internet advertising market,” David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which contributed to the report, said in a conference call.

Internet advertising in the United States grew to $23.4 billion in 2008, an increase of 10.6 percent from 2007, according to the Internet Advertising Revenue Report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group representing online advertisers, as well as PricewaterhouseCoopers.

That was the only category of advertising spending that grew in 2008 other than cable television, which rose 7.8 percent, according to Nielsen figures supplied for the report.

Australia has yet to have an eCommerce boom. For most of the last decade, the infrastructure and installed base just wasn't there. Internet advertising in Australia has largely been limited to imitating conventional marketing.

The former administration was Internet-phobic, releasing constant articles to the press that were intended to scare Australians away from using the Internet and implementing policies that retarded the growth of Internet use for both individuals and small business.
Large business, institutes of higher education, and government were encouraged onto the Net, producing a digital divide that inhibited the development of small business in a more subversive way.

In the last two years as more businesses come to understand the power of the Internet can be applied to their business goals, the influence of the Howard administration has waned.

SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explor
e. It will be a fascinating and informative journey.

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The Buzz is all Broadband

Image by Brett L. via FlickrFrom Reuters:

Australia has slower and more expensive Internet access than many other developed countries, and though penetration rates are on a par, officials and experts have warned Australia may fall behind in competitiveness without faster, nationwide coverage.

They're not telling anyone in Australia anything new. Expensive broadband with poor service has come to be expected. Leading the race to the bottom is the company that can most affect service: Telstra.
There is even a term: fraudband, to describe ADSL service sold for too much but slower than dialup.
Some people in the technical field consider all Australian ADSL service fraudband because of the coverage maps. Coverage maps are published online (supposedly) showing where ADSL in different versions is available. There are two problems with the maps:

1. Commonly where coverage is shown, the telephone exchanges are too far away. Although full service is indicated within 4km of an exchange, past 1.3km or so, the quality (read: speed and reliablity) drops off dramatically.
2. The out of date, or just poorly wired, exchanges are full. ADSL may be offered in an area, but you take out a lottery ticket to get service. Some homes almost next door to an exchange have waited over a year.

IHT picked up on the story:

Australia could be a step closer to building a high-speed broadband network after the government canceled a deal for a rural system that would have overlapped with the one planned nationwide. The scrapping of the rural network plan, which was to cost 958 million Australian dollars, or $888 million, came as the government planned to invite bids for a national network as early as next week.

Hate to tellya, folks, but that's been going on for more than 5 years.
The government has commissioned Telstra to provide outdated service to regional (rural) areas, then realized the service would conflict with other plans - wasting years and hundreds of millions of dollars. Regional users are forced from one flaky plan to the next (CDMA to NextG is the latest.) and still have dropouts and poor service.
The government has looked to private enterprise to pick up some of the slack by offering grants and special loans. Satellite service and free service expands too quickly for these small firms to keep up. One abandoned network is cobbled onto the next, creating a nightmare for customers and those companies that took the bait.

Like the old AT&T in the US, Telstra is great at the big projects:

Australian telecommunications company Telstra has begun the arduous task of laying a 9,000 km undersea internet cable from Australia to Hawaii.

Again, that's not the whole story. Telstra is laying that cable, not out of social consciousness or entrepreneurial zeal, but out of monopolistic necessity. Telstra has been buying bandwidth from old rival Optus for years.

If you can't even get email, why bother to open up a business online? An inspiring example is as passion for beauty.
There is no question some companies have braved the madness and succeeded though. Relatively, for a country that needs reliable communications from coast to coast like no other, Australia has made the road to success unnecessarily hard.
There are many words to describe the slosh of media in one direction then the next, with only miniscule real progress: most of them 4-letter words.

SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explore. It will be a fascinating and informative journey.

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Google's Universal Search

This is one I saw coming.
I've been telling clients to get out their webcams and post the video to YouTube to help increase the visibility of their business online. Only a couple of clients took me up on the suggestion. It was hard to overcome the poor Internet connectivity in Australia.

Universal Search
Google's default search will be a Universal Search. The SERPs will include videos, images, news, blogs and web pages. - Everything. It's going to change the SEO/SEM services dramatically.
Universal Search is presently only available in the US. As it spreads across the world, Optimization will include more types of media. The competition for top SERP listings is too competitive to avoid.

You see, really Google is more than a single search engine. In fact, it's many search engines. It's surprising how few people actually use the other search listings. Here's a list:

• Blog Search
• Book Search
• Catalogs
• Code Search
• Directory
• Finance
• Images
• Local/Maps
• News
• Patent Search
• Product Search
• Scholar
• Video
• Web Search

Each link on the list represents a search engine within Google. Until now, you had to find and use the other search engines. Universal Search, already implemented in the US, will mean all of these search engines will provide SERPs.
If you want just websites and webpages, you'll have to specify that option.

For example, one of the most useful is the Images search. Sometimes, trying to illustrate a website in meaningful ways -something other than pretty girls and other fluff- can be difficult. A quick run through the Images search can give you an idea how others have tackled the problem.
Google News is not comprehensive, but it does provide very recent, relevant information.
For example, I try to stay on top of web developments. I have a weekly email alert on the News search about SEO in Australia.

How will Universal Search affect SEO?
Most websites in Australia are static. The wildfire of SEO services indicates the majority of those sites are not optimized, or even structured. (You gotta wonder what those folks were studying in Web Design classes?)
A few gurus have put out the opinion that for a site to appear high in a Universal Search, the site is going to have to incorporate more universal elements: blogs, images, documents, videos, etc. Naming conventions for these elements will become significant. "img100016.jpg" will be replaced with "black-shoes-look-great.jpg". Because images have their own search engine at Google, it isn't inconceivable that the name of an image could become as significant as a URL.
That presents a problem for a market where business is only beginning to realize the potential of the Web. (Most of my clients are already in the 21st century, I'm happy to say.)

Connectivity still an issue
Some people simply responded: "I can't watch YouTube. Why should I think my customers will?" - And they were right.
Finally, Internet connectivity is improving in Australia. Consumers have become aware of the "Fraudband" -ADSL 256 mbps and below- offerings and ignoring them. Improving does not mean fully implemented. Telstra's rollout of ADSL2 and ADSL2+ is still "aspirational" over the next 9 months. Fraudband is still being sold.
("Aspirational" was Howard's latest way of saying "non-core promises". It's a little like selling opportunity in a multilevel marketing scheme...Howard lost the last election, btw.)

Google may delay the Universal Search rollout for Australia
It may be a good business decision for Google to hold off on providing the Australian market with Universal Search. Large areas of the country, even metropolitan areas, may not have the bandwidth to explore the links.
Google commands nearly 80% of all search traffic in Australia. If a large portion of the Web community cannot click on the SERPs from Universal Search ("USERP"s?), Google could lose its primacy.
The Australian market only represents 1% of the world's Internet population, but it is a rich, competitive and -most importantly- growing market for PPC advertising. Google has only had its regional facilities running for about a year. Yahoo Australia (Yahoo7) offers a much more reliable regional PPC service, and doesn't carry the negative baggage of Google.
The decision for Google will come down to ROI, I imagine. Is the growing Australian market valuable enough not to risk the losses from Universal Search?

Aspirational ADSL
Telstra and other large providers are lowering prices and increasing speeds. Sometimes so quietly you can hardly hear the moss move. Telstra will let customers upgrade to faster speeds free, but the person has to ask for the upgrade. Sometimes the new plan cost less than the fraudband! On the ground, most consumers aren't aware of the situation -yet.
The majority of Australian consumers can now see YouTube videos, use VoIP, and even watch some TV on the Web.
Telstra and Optus are filling TV screens with ads offering a wireless router with ADSL. The "networked home". Great idea. It's been working fine in New Zealand for more than 4 years. Relatively few Australian households enjoy the benefits of a networked home.
(Please forgive the obvious cynicism. It's unavoidable. Australians have been retarded for so long by their government and the large telcos.

A practical run through
Take images as an example. Run a quick search on any topic in Google Images. You'll quickly see that many images were named by software. The name may be from a digital camera, or from the website where the image was purchased.
In the world of Universal Search, that's a missed opportunity. The name of the image may become as powerful an optimization tool as the URL is today. In the Image Search, the name of the image is comparable to the URL of the page; possibly even the page title. It remains to be seen how important to Optimization ALT and TITLE tags will be. Will they be a part of the web page? - or will they be incorporated into the Relevancy calculations for an image?
It's easy to see that ALT tags could become much more important. Those web designers who used the ALT tag to stuff keywords into a document are going have to rethink their (key)words.
Image quality and file size will become more important.
Evenless relevant images will be important for building links. Initially at least, it's not hard to see many sites will fill with images. The practice might come to be called "image bombing", where a site crowds as many images as possible onto its pages to increase its visibility. At least initially, it will improve rankings and conversion rates. How this practice will work out in the long run is yet to be seen.
Hopefully, web designers will press relevant illustrations of business processes; and better product pictures. If not the Web Designers, the SEO people will, I assure you.

Illustrators' Renaissance
Universal Search could drive a renaissance of vector graphics in place of bitmaps. The size of the image file will not just an issue for page download times.
A blotchy image will drive away visitors. Images with good contrast and composition look better in thumbnails appearing next to the link in the search results.

How many web designers have howled into the dark night about having to explain complicated business functions in text, knowing full well that most of the viewers will scan over the page (and never read the well-crafted words)? Good illustrations, animations, and videos that illustrate business processes and services will have a renaissance of sorts. These creative concoctions will have full ranking with web pages and blog articles.

Blogs and Blog articles
Blogs have been the lost hinterland in Australia. Sometimes I think the Outback has a better reputation than blogs.
As it was with Internet access only a few years ago, blog numbers are dominated by large business, national media, universities and TAFEs. Young people are blogging on the social networking sites, of course. Many sites offer free blogging. There are a few blogs set up as ecommerce sites. But few Australians are in the blogosphere.
Citizen journalism here is hindered by restrictive and capricious laws. The concept of slander in Australia is restrictive. It doesn't matter if someone is telling the truth, if the content damages the reputation of the subject, the author is liable for slander.
This is not the United States.

Blogs and blog articles will have to be SEO'd to the same level as web pages under Universal Search. This opens up opportunities for businesses to drive traffic to their websites.
It depends on the editorial policy of the blog, and its goals.
Small and medium sized businesses can demonstrate expertise, build professional reputation, and even have a little fun with blogging. If a blog is too commercial, some blogging sites (e.g., Blogger) will remove access to the blog.
Business blogs can contain anecdotes from Customer service, for example; or outlandish uses for their products; even personal stories about holidays and parties. There is no law that says a business blog has to be all business.
With Universal Search, all these articles will have much more significance.

It's not all that new, really
When you think about it, Universal Search is not a new concept. Google and other search engines have always counted links from YouTube videos, blogs, and their other search engines in the Relevancy calculation. Universal Search is only making that fact obvious.
In doing so, Google is giving those who use the Web community an advantage - and encouraging others to become more community minded. Google is taking a leadership position in defining the relevancy of a website (or blog).
Google's commitment to Relevancy is laudable. My gut reaction is to applaud, in fact. But my head makes me look again at what it may mean to business.

The comments in this article are based on a well-established assumption: That search users will choose from the first 1- 3 or 4-6 of the SERPs. With many new media represented in the SERPs, will that assumption hold true? There will be images, blog articles, and videos mixed in with web pages. Will that cause natural search results to become increasingly irrelevant to business?
If so, will the PPC (Sponsored Links) become far more important and expensive?

Google is taking a leadership role in defining the Web community and Relevance, as it always has. But is Universal Search is a gamble in many ways.

SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explore. It will be a fascinating and informative journey. Sphere: Related Content