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Online advertising is back!

Spent yesterday at the Ad:TECH 2004 in New York City. Wow! It was as if the good old days of the Dot-Com era are back. Since 2001, this is the first show that we have been to where you literally could not walk. There were an incredible number of people at the show and it seems that the organizers failed to anticipate the number of attendees and the advertisers because the aisles were too narrow for so many people to walk and there were booths even in hallways.



The following are iProceed's takeaways from AD:TECH - The Event for Interactive Marketing:

  • Online advertising is hot.
  • There were more advertisers than publishers and agencies at the conference.
  • New companies are entering the online advertising space at a fast pace.
  • Google is still the 800-pound gorilla while Overture , FindWhat, Mamma, and Advertising.com are the 100-pound dogs. There were dozens of others companies that are copying the Google business model or coming up with slight variations on it, but none impressed us. They may be able to get some business from advertisers who are looking for an inexpensive way to advertise online, but we are very skeptical if they can achieve critical mass. In fact we are afraid that many of them may not even be around for too long. Conclusion: iProceed is staying with AdSense.
  • There were several affiliate program companies but as our research shows the days of affiliate programs are numbered and that was quite obvious from the number of people at their booths. The business model of affiliate program companies is not based on creating value for the publisher, and therefore, the affiliate programs are already going out of fashion.
  • Almost all the players in the space of companies that install a software on a user's hard-drive and then monitor the user behavior to serve targeted ads (a variety of buzzwords are being used to describe these business models though many attendees that we spoke to still thought of these companies as being in the illegal/gray area business) were present. Hotbar, Claria, WhenU, etc. all had invested in big booths. Our verdict: Stay away from them. Any business model that operates in gray area is best avoided.