"Folks, this is why Amazon is doing what they are doing with A9.com" (discussed below)

Posted By: Jim Bonfield, Sacramento - Local Online Advertising Specialist

Report: Local Online Ad Spend to Rise 46 Percent in '05
› › › ClickZ News

By Rob McGann | January 27, 2005

Spending on local online advertising will total approximately $3.9 billion in 2005, a 46 percent increase over the $2.7 billion 2004 total, according to research conducted by Borrell Associates on 210 U.S. media markets.

Those growth figures are roughly double what researchers expected to measure for online local in 2005, said Gordon Borrell, president and chief executive of the Portsmouth, Virginia-based company. (The company measured a 28.7 percent increase in local ad spending online in 2004.)

"We've always viewed local advertisers as fairly conservative in that they don't have that much to spend," Borrell said. "Typically you expect them to funnel most of their ad spend into direct mail and yellow pages, with only a small percentage for online, but that is not the case at all this year. Local advertisers have started rushing toward this. Here they come." Full