Greg Sterling reports this week…
The IAB reported its estimate that 2007 saw 25% growth in online ad revenues for a total of $21.1 billion vs. $16.9 billion in 2006. You can expect the distributions to be similar to 2006:
- Search — 41%
- Display — 32%
- Classifieds (which includes directories) — 18%
- Lead Generation — 8%
And TechCrunch offers more data.
In another post, Sterling pulls together some other advertising data and estimates, including…
Most interesting to me in the MerchatCircle survey is the finding that most SMBs aren’t willing to spend more than $100 per month on online, whether or not they believe print YP to be an effective ad medium. That’s $1200 per year. Compare that with a rougly $3500 average annual print YP spend. ReachLocal, by comparison, says it’s getting a minimum of $1000 per month from advertisers, but it’s going after the bigger print YP spenders.
Anecdotally, Front Porch Forum is finding each small business it deals with to have a different story and approach to buying online ad space. Some won’t take a freebie while others will spend in excess of the $1000/month mentioned above without hesitation.
Robert Putnam will speak at the University of Vermont on April 28, 2008, sharing a lecture titled “Civic Engagement in a Diverse and Changing America.”
Putnam’s Bowling Alone was a ground-breaker documenting the decline of many facets of American community life. Steve Yelvington writes about Putnam briefly this week… here.
Rich Gordon writes in more detail about Putnam’s more recent work, part of which Putnam summarizes as “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ – that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
UPDATE: Just got the following details…
2008 Mark L. Rosen Memorial Lecture
Robert D. Putnam
‘E Pluribus Unum: Rebuilding Community in a Diverse and Changing America’
Monday, April 28, 7 PM – Free and Open to the Public
Silver Maple Ballroom, Dudley H. Davis Center
Reception immediately following
Co-Sponsored by UVM Political Science Department and the Vermont Humanities Council
Professor Putnam is Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. He has written a dozen books, translated into seventeen languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and more recently Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of promising new forms of social connectedness. His previous book, Making Democracy Work, was praised by the Economist as “a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber.” Both Making Democracy work and Bowling Alone rank high among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last several decades.
Various entrepreneurial gurus (Marc Andreessen, Paul ) point, when asked for the most important ingredient for a start-up, to the market. That is, it doesn’t matter how clever your technology is, or your marketing, or how brilliant your team is if there is no demand for what you provide. If you’re working in a market that does have a healthy amount of demand for what you deliver… success is more likely. The existing market is the most fundamental driver of all. So goes one view.
Front Porch Forum is in the business of helping people get to know their neighbors… and to enhance the sense of community within neighborhoods. Ample evidence points to a growing desire from people who want just that (which I’ll save for another post).
And here’s a new documentary from England on the subject…
My Street
After 14 years of living on the same road Sue knew practically none of her neighbours. Intrigued by what stories might lie on her own doorstep, she began knocking on the 116 doors on her street and meeting some of the 300 people who are her neighbours.What she found were remarkable stories, from millionaires living next door to people on benefits, to convicted drug smugglers and classical composers. Sue meets party animals and recluses, the very young and the very old, hears stories of success and tragedy and sees how illness and loneliness, hope and happiness have left their mark on the lives of her neighbours.
More from Kevin Harris about this.
Great data available from the Portland, OR police department… crime statistics by neighborhood.
I’ve looked at the crime log for my city (Burlington, VT) and, regrettably, the data isn’t presented in a way that is very useful to the interested homeowner. I assume that the data is collected to help the police do their job, more than to help inform the public.
I would find it valuable to know every time a string of cars are broken into in my neighborhood… dates, locations, details. Same with grafitti, house break-ins, vandalism, etc.
I’m sure the police have this data… it’s just not easy to get to and may be under wraps for other legitimate reasons. Sure would be nice to have the police dept. website presenting all this data with an RSS feed that popped up on my feed reader when we get an uptick in trouble… “eight car break-ins reported in your neighborhood in past two days.”
What I’m left with is our informal neighborhood watch via Front Porch Forum. That is, some people post a note on their FPF neighborhood forum when they get ripped off. This is much better than nothing, but not as comprehensive as I’d like to see.
Some people outside of our pilot area may think that Front Porch Forum provides conventional online message boards for neighborhoods… not so. Here’s an example of a straight-forward web-based threaded message board from a Seattle neighborhood… click here. That’s a different animal.
Adena Schutzberg writes in Directions Magazine about three different efforts to provide neighborhood data for GIS… Maponics, Urban Mapping, Inc., and Zillow. This article touches on several issues for each of these companies…
Andy Sack, founding CEO of now-shuttered Judy’s Book, offers this advice for folks looking to get traction in the “local reviews and word of mouth referrals business”…
i) GET TO CRITICAL MASS
- Do this by limiting geography — stay in one geography for 3 years. Yes, 3 years. Do not expand geography for the first 36 months. Every successful online local business has been in one geography for 3 years.
- Do this by limiting the number of categories or professions you’re trying to get word of mouth on. Do not try and do the entire yellow pages. Choose at most five categories. I might suggest: restaurants, dentists, doctors, auto mechanics, and real estate.
- Do this by aggressive customer acquisition. Whatever your strategy for customer acquisition, get aggressive about. Do not sit in an ivory tower and expect to get to critical mass.
- Aggregate content from other places on the web so you can avoid the empty database problem
- Spend as little money as possible
ii) Go back to step i
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more