Internet Advertising
While many people think that everything on the Internet is free … or should be, I have to tell you that very little on the Internet is free and maintaining a site like the Hervey Bay Gossip costs money.
To cover those costs many web sites carry advertising. The way that a site makes money from that advertising varies from site to site and only the sites that get a lot of visits every day attract the big advertising dollars. And those dollars are big.
For the first half of this year advertising in the US amounted to $70.5 billion dollars and . As I write this the current exchange rate translates that into $A96.3 billion. Of that figure $3.6 billion, or 9.4%, was spent on Internet advertising.
The biggest advertiser for that period was Vonage, a company that provides online phone calls to many parts of the world. That company spent $US20,632,000.
The next biggest was Classmates.com, a company that runs a website that reconnects old school friends. That company spent $US15,510,000 in advertising for the first half of the year.
Those figures dwarfed the amount spent by traditional online companies such as Amazon – the book e-tailer turned mega-store. Amazon spent a mere $US5,462,000.
The top 20 even included a university. The University of Phoenix (in Arizona) spent $US4 million dollars in advertising.
Now no company spends money on advertising in places where it is not going to see a return for that expenditure so from those figures you can see just how important advertising on web sites is becoming.
