Search Engine Tigers

Despite fears of a recession, with anticipated cutbacks in marketing expenditure (as well as layoffs, which have already happened at Yahoo, and are expected to happen at ASK shortly), things are actually looking rosy for the Search industry, especially in Europe.

According to GroupM, by the end of this year the Internet will be the dominating medium in Sweden, with the UK and Denmark following behind rather quickly. Looking at the figures from the UK, this assumes a growth rate of ~31% for internet based advertising for this year, which will take the internet to just a hair under 25% of advertising expenditure, with TV (the current champion) sitting on 26% of market share.

Exactly how much of that expenditure is expected to be Search related? 65-70%. That means that in the UK alone, the estimated $ expenditure on search is expected to be over $4.2 billion. Not too shabby!

What about the US market? Well, internet advertising expenditure lags far behind in the US. According to TNS Media Intelligence, in the first quarter of 2007 while TV had a 44.6% share of ad spend, the internet came in at only 7.7%, putting it ahead of radio, but well behind newspapers and magazines. eMarketer predicts that by 2011 ad spend in the US will still heavily favor TV (~$86 billion), but that internet advertising will have, by then, moved into second place with an ad spend of $35 billion.

So we have interesting times ahead, with search projected to continue to grow by leaps and bounds. Of course, outside pressures can change these projections one way or another, but still it’s good to be in an industry that looks to have such a bright future ahead of it.

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