According to The Globe & Mail and Keith McArthur, online advertising in Canada surpassed the one billion dollar mark in Canada in 2006, and is expected to rise a further 32% this year. It also represents an 80% increase over 2005.

This is apparently about 8% of the total advertising spend in Canada, but those numbers will be confirmed in coming weeks/months.

So how does it play out?

According to the article, the lion’s share at 36% is display advertising; with search advertising at 35%; classified at 27% and email advertising at 2%.

MSNBC and the David C. Churbuck article Google and the Rebirth of Banner Ads provided not only some interesting insight into the Google Doubleclick deal, but also this little nugget way, way, way, way down the article, and it’s a long article so perhaps if reading it, you might have zoned out. It is after all Friday.

I could have written “thoughts for the weekend” but decided that sounded too intense. No, let’s take this Friday to sit a moment and look over some more or less random tidbits.

Hmmm….

After a week of doing this and that in search I can’t shake off the feeling that something’s afoot in search engine land.

Different from ranking shakeup complaints, there seems to be a growing discontent, some kind of unease with Google.

Recently Google has  invited us to participate in Google Audio Ads. Here are some screenshots.

Cheers!

Sasha

On the heels of the Google Doubleclick story, and the Google Clear Channel story and the Yahoo print story and the ebay TV story and the Spotrunner tv story and the…

Well, you get my point.

Onilne advertising is only beginning to heat up. And while traditional advertisers have their eyeballs askance and their eyebrows furrowed at the antics of the upstarts, the upstart as looking at traditional advertising models with disruptive technologies in mind and rate cards in sight.

Red Herring announce today in its YouTube Lining Up Summer Ads article that pre-roll and post roll ads will become a part of the YouTube experience this summer.

Images to represent text may look very nice but they really do hurt search engine wise. Search engines don’t see, read or understand text on images at all. Just plain don’t. No plans to change that either.

So, for styling, for making that headline or logo look just the way you want, you have to resort to CSS.

Now although there are literally thousands of fonts out there, one of them closely matching the style you like, you have to keep in mind which fonts users have installed. Oh, and Mac users might have different fonts, of course.

The folks over at MSN are about to upgrade the adcenter interface. Here are some screenshots of it. (Notice how an Ad Group is called … an “Ad Group” rather than an “Order” … Finally!)

Enjoy!

Sasha

Jen Evans of Sequentia spoke this morning at AIMSCanada regarding etribes and online communities.

She listed seven reasons why a company should consider a community or Web 2.0 strategy.

They are:

Each on its own is a good reason. All of them together are compelling.

Sometimes one kicks in an open door. With force, if needed.

Imagine an important business meeting where the company’s web strategy is discussed. Boombastic it comes from one of the speakers; “We need a web site!”

Well, yeah; duh! That is a given. Without a web site, no web strategy. This is not really something we should have to talk about.

Search engine friendliness is like that. It shouldn’t be something we have to talk about. It’s a given. Deciding not to make your site easy to browse and use, whether for handicapped or mobile users or for search engine spiders, that is something that warrants a conscious, clear decision.

“Yahoo must use its multiple websites and services to gain a stronger position in social networking.”
– Jeff Weiner, executive VP, Yahoo’s Networking divison

Can you gain a position in social networking simply by having, making, buying and promoting social web sites?

On the same day (April 24) that Yahoo announced Yahoo Music will include a searchable lyrics database, a Chinese court ruled that Yahoo China violates music copyrights.