t was the last part of the advertising sector to fall and may be the first to recover, but online advertising is now in a recession. With the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) having reported March quarter financials, we can get a pretty good sense of how the sector did as a whole. If you add up the online advertising revenues of these four online advertising bellwethers, the total online advertising revenues for the quarter came to $7.9 billion, a 2 percent decline from a year ago and a 7 percent decline from the fourth quarter.
The Online Ad Recession Is Officially Here: First Quarterly Decline In Revenues
In case anyone was wondering whether or not advertising was on some sort of never ending growth cycle. Money is disappearing from the ad market, it isn’t moving from newspapers and TV to websites. And just as newspapers and TV are getting squashed, so will websites that rely strictly on advertising for revenue.