By now it's pretty clear that the gold medal for attracting eyeballs to the Sydney Olympiad and its sponsors is not television. It's the web. At least that's what both Media Metrix and Nielsen//NetRatings numbers indicate. Today, Media Metrix announced that NBCOlympics.com was the Top Gainer for the week ending September 24, 2000 with 544,000 average daily unique visitors. Throughout the Games, traffic to NBCOlympics.com as well as Olympics.com also increased substantially week over week. Traffic continued to increase from the week of the opening ceremony through the first full week of the Games, with NBCOlympics.com and Olympics.com increasing …

After this Monday's discussion of the latest research from The Pew Internet & American Life Project, which says that Internet usage growth has "hit a brick wall," some people's initial reaction was a mix of depression and panic. "So this is as good as it gets?" A little impetuous, don't you think? An email from one of our readers this morning may put some minds at ease. Pierre Bouvard, EVP of the Arbitron Company, wrote, "I agree that total new users will slow. The big growth will come not in new people to the web, but with increased usage." …

According to Competitive Media Reporting, the first half of 2000 brought strong gains for the ad industry with ad dollars increasing 14.9%, to $47.7 billion. CMR says ad spending on every media type increased since last year, with the Internet, not surprisingly, registering the largest increase of all. Ad spending on the web increased by 65% to $1.3 billion, accounting for about 2.7% of all advertising dollars, which puts the medium above outdoor and Sunday magazines in terms of overall dollars. That's considering that at 25.5%, outdoor had a significant percentage increase as its ad dollars hit $1.1 …

Last I checked, the wheel has already been invented, gravity has been defined, and 1 plus 1 still equals 2. So why is it that seemingly reputable research companies that use words like "leading" and "cutting-edge" to identify themselves, keep trying to pass off common knowledge as new discoveries. For example, yesterday, Cyber Dialogue released the results of analysis that "underscores the importance of businesses identifying and targeting their most profitable customers." Ready... Set... DUH!!! Targeting is important? Who knew! The company's official news release states that the top 20% of online shoppers who spent at …

You've heard it at every media conference, seminar and roundtable - "don't sink your entire media budget into one medium." That piece of advice is especially valuable when it comes to the Internet. Why? Because currently about half of all American adults don't even have Internet access. Is that likely to change any time soon? Not according to a survey released Thursday by The Pew Internet & American Life Project, which says that Internet usage growth has hit a brick wall. According to the report, of those currently without Internet access, 57% said they have no plans to go …

Media Metrix today released the top 50 Web and Digital Media properties for August 2000, inspiring some to ask, "What happened to stickiness?" According to Media Metrix, users spent an average of 76.7 minutes online per usage day and viewed over 703 different Web pages per month - that translates into little more than one minute per Web page. But that does not mean people are surfing less. According to the report, Internet users spent over 93 billion total minutes online during the month with over 39 million people went online in an average day. Additionally, each …

In case one of your targeting parameters is gender, I thought you may want to know that the newest eMarketer's eDemographics & Usage Patterns Report says that women now account for 37.1 million of all U.S. adult users, representing 49% of the total active online population. Some research firms have already placed women at 50% or higher, but eMarketer predicts that only by year 2003, the number of American women online will pass the majority mark - 51% - increasing to 78.8 million. At the end of the day, 2% doesn't really make all that much of a …

By now, all those who thought the Internet would kill radio are probably kicking themselves. Granted, radio stations, for the most part, have not mastered the art of using the web to their advantage, but they're getting there. And there are plenty of companies more than willing to help. For example, iBEAM Broadcasting Corp., the leading global streaming media network (SMN), yesterday announced an enhancement to its On-Target ad insertion service that will enable traditional, on-air radio stations to replace the ads delivered over the airwaves with Internet-only ads delivered via the Web. This upgrade is designed to help radio …

As we all well know, there are two sides to every story. Some say the banner is dead; some say it's evolving into something bigger and better. Regardless of where you stand on the banner life expectancy issue, it's an undeniable fact that the format could use some help in almost every aspect from creative to placement strategy. That's a generality, of course, and some advertisers have already figured out how to make a banner work, but that, apparently, is such a rare occurrence that those banners were deemed worthy of being placed into a museum. Today marks …

Many advertisers have been toying around with the idea of rich media ads for a while now, but most are cautious about pouring their money into rich ads mainly because the majority pf web users are still stuck in narrowband land. Even though most websites and ad networks today are happy to run your rich media ads, bandwidth is still an issue, but for how long? According to eMarketer, at year-end 1999, broadband Internet access accounted for a mere 14.6% of all US subscribers, or 5.43 million users. "The inability of service providers to roll out broadband services quickly …