This is an interesting comment, especially for someone like me who works in classifieds and, in many of the business areas I am involved in, depend on micro formats, contextual ads and, in general, smaller text link type ad revenues much more than display intensive and hyper graphic ad environments.
“Some believe that Google, which is largely dependent on text ads it places alongside search results, is likely to be more immune to an advertising recession than rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft, who earn a greater share of their revenues from display advertisements” (New York Times, 31.01.2008)
Of course I do not believe anyone is immune to a recession, but it’s interesting that micro formats (like classifieds) always seem to fare better in recession-ist advertising environments.
Nevertheless it seems that even the big heroes such as Schibsted, are suffering the impact of the slowdown. I think a good proof of this is the way the Spanish online real estate operations (namely Fotocasa) have shown slower growth in Q4 of 2007. There is no comment yet on what could be the impact on Spain’s Internet darling for the company, the traditionally very profitable and leading Infojobs portal. Print revenue for International Classifieds has gone down 25% versus Q4 2006 and online has increased 56% in the same period.
Tags: classifieds, Fotocasa, Google results, Infojobs, Microsoft, recession, schibsted, Yahoo
