• by March 2, 2001

By Ken Liebeskind

"It's not dead, but it's not as good as we hoped," Marc Ryan, a Jupiter Media Metrix analyst, said at the beginning of his presentation at the Jupiter Media Forum in New York yesterday.

He was speaking of online advertising, which continues to grow at smaller increments, even as dot-coms close and the industry restrains its ad spending.

Ryan, who spends much of his time crunching numbers, said online ad impressions has grown 6.9 times since mid-1999. "But the hyper growth is over," he said, indicating that while growth was at 100% per quarter in 1999 it is just 21% now. "But at least it's still growing," he said.

He presented lists of good things and bad things about online advertising. The good things are that impressions are still growing, advertising budgets are up, the number of Internet users is up and the amount of time spent online is up. The number of users increased to 79 million from 59 million over the past year while users spend 676 minutes a month online compared with 428 minutes last year.

The bad things are the dot-com failures, the fact that too many house ads are used, the unproven ROI of Internet commerce and the declining Internet ad value. There were 107 dot.com failures in the past year and a half.

He used a scale graphic to show the balance between the good and bad factors to illuminate his main point -- that the status of Internet advertising is up in the air.

At the conclusion of his presentation, he provided tips for advertising buyers and sellers. He thinks sellers should run less house ads on their sites, because the ads generate no revenue and clutter the site. Removing them would also make the paid ads stand out better. He also says buyers and sellers should take advantage of seasonal ads. Ads should be bought off season to get better rates, while sellers should take advantage of Christmas and other hi run seasons to sell at higher rates and find new customers.

When asked what effect the new IAB standardized ads would have, he said rates will go up for the new ads, since they are larger than the traditional banners. But he also said the ads aren't really new, since they'd been used by Forbes.com and other sites. So he's unsure how much demand there will be. But he thinks sites should pick up the formats to make it easier for advertisers to standardize their ad buys.

CBS WEB STRATEGY DISCUSSED

Leslie Moonves, president/CEO of CBS, was elated yesterday morning, since 34 million viewers tuned into Survivor II last night. He responded with an upbeat keynote address at the Jupiter Media Forum which concluded with this bold statement: "Our Web group will be profitable this year."

The profit stems from a strategy that was criticized for awhile, but proved to be successful. The network avoided launching a portal, which it was encouraged to do, and instead developed a series of content rich sites it drives users to with on air promos.

"We built hot s