Can Games Capture a Share of Online Advertising Revenue?
January 31, 2006 Despite its rocky history, nearly everyone agrees that the potential for online advertising is enormous. The argument goes that advertising budgets should be spent roughly in accordance with how consumers spend their time. Thus, if 20% of consumer time is spent online, 20% of advertising budgets should be spent online. Of course, that thinking lost a lot of people a lot of money in the late 1990s. Online advertising spending peaked in 2000 at $8 billion and declined for several years, even as people were spending more time online. However, the last two years have seen record spending for online advertising. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, online advertising could reach $12 billion in 2005 (up from slightly under $10 billion in 2004). Of course, the biggest growth area for online advertising is from the search and keyword advertising best exemplified by Google and Yahoo. Online games are attracting an increasing amount of consumer time, but they attract a
