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December 9, 2007
Neighbourhood Ads
As local becomes increasingly important to the big search engines business models they will start to encroach on turf that is valued by libraries - public and campus.
A new report (exec summary is free) by Borrell Associates says that "local online advertising" is worth $8.5 billion today and projects that it will reach $12.6 billion in 2008. Google and their cohort (and the NYSE) wll never be satisfied with billion dollar surpluses every quarter. They are targeting a few key areas in the coming months - local and video.
"This report details what we expect to see next year as local businesses shift more dollars over to online advertising. While the overall growth of local online advertising will be 48% next year, we anticipate only 9% growth for banner-type advertising. Meanwhile, video and paid search will see the greatest growth."
Are our libraries ready to compete with an aggressively localized search engine experience? Are we buying ad words for libraries? Or just the local book shops. Is Google Scholar exempt from ads or will our campus Google search experiences be quite different in the coming months? Can we attract default searches locally?
It is my opinion that local search is the most underdiscussed and misunderstood threat to campus and neighbourhood libraries.
Stephen
Posted by stephen at December 9, 2007 2:08 PM