About 18 months ago we completed our first report on the future of online advertising. You may not recall this, but the projected Adspend growths from most of the research companies at the time were huge. We didn’t believe them, and cut their estimates significantly. Unless the next 6 months have record Adspend, we will be closer to the truth than they were too

Now, as we gear up for the first revision of the report next month, we hear the opposite - that online advertising may collapse completely - that too is unlikely for the following reasons:

(i) There is a lot of attention online, and its growing - and advertisers want to reach that.

(ii) The internet is still growing, there will be more people online every year for the next 5 years at least

Its just that in tough times, Ad spend gets reigned back. As Profy notes, even in the Depression there was still advertising:

I decided to see how advertising was doing at that difficult time and see if it was really that bad. To my surprise the results were contrary to what I expected to see with advertising actually looking like a relatively healthy industry for the generally bad financial environment at the time.

People need to make reasonable buying decisions during a recession. The first thing to keep in mind is that people will not stop buying products that are essential to them.

We haven’t done the calcs yet for the revised report, but I’d not be surprised if the rates of growth and rates of retrenchment will be roughly balanced, and keep online Ads within c 5% either way of where it is now, in the next year or so.