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Media Life New Advertisers Debut on Web at Healthy Pace Numbers up nearly 11 percent from a year ago By Jeremy Schlosberg Amid all the concerns of an online advertising slowdown, a lot more angst is tossed around than hard numbers. That's because when the hard numbers come in, there's not much of a slowdown to talk about. While online ad spending is no longer growing at the rate it was a year or two ago, new advertisers continue to come online at a rate healthily exceeding that of last year at the same time, according to current data from Leading Web Advertisers, an online ad measurement firm. For the week between Jan. 15 and 21 of this year, LWA tracked 523 brands newly advertised on the web (see chart). That represents a 10.6 percent increase over the number of advertisers who were new to the web during the equivalent week in 2000, which was January 17 to 23. Remember too what the data is showing: the 523 new advertisers for the week in question in 2001 are all new, it's not just the 10.6 percent difference from the year before that's new. So in a way, as long as a reasonable number of new advertisers continue to come online, the medium is growing. "If you look at rate of change it's dropping, but if you look at absolutes it's fine," notes LWA co-founder and co-CEO Michael Kubin. In May 1999, the first full month tracked by Leading Web Advertisers, the average weekly number of new brands was 250. LWA tracks all brands that are new to the web within 24 hours of an ad's first appearance. The so-called "slowdown" in online advertising that so many in the financial world and in the press talk about is actually a slowdown in the rate of growth. Given that this rate of growth was, for a while, unsustainably high, this sort of slowdown was completely to be expected. Why, then, has there been so much doom-and-gloom coverage? "Doom and gloom is a more interesting story than things seeming to be sort of fair or moderate," says Kubin. "Also, I think everybody's wanted to take a shot at this for a long time." Still, Kubin isn't completely sanguine about the immediate future of online spending. He knows the numbers are dropping off a very high base, but he can't yet say what the trend is. "The real question is, how far is that number going to drop?" he says. From the data his company has already accumulated, however, he feels it's safe to consider any month with at least 500 new advertisers coming online a reasonably healthy month. LWA tracks advertising on more than 2,500 of the web's largest ad-supported sites at least once a day. Its database contains information on 50,000 brands and advertisers.
NUMBER OF NEW WEB ADVERTISERS
Source: Leading Web Advertisers
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