• by September 21, 2004

Geoff Ramsey, the CEO of eMarketer, the aggregator of all sorts of data on the online universe, is calling for an industry standard to benchmark online ad revenues. Currently, the industry relies on the quarterly data reports issued by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, but there are many other sources including reports from Merrill Lynch, Piper Jaffray, Deutsche Bank, Forrester Research, Gartner, and Jupiter.

The proliferation of data on online ad revenues and forecasts was evident in Ramsey's presentation yesterday on day one of the Interactive Advertising World Conference and Expo. Ramsey, known for pelting his audiences with numerous slides, flashed one in particular that showed just how many forecasts there are for online ad revenues.

Ramsey says there are more than a dozen researchers estimating the size of the online ad market and their estimates vary from lowest to highest by as much as $3 billion. It is rather strange that online media, supposedly the most measurable media, doesn't have a single number for benchmarking.

For his part, Ramsey says eMarketer, which aggregates e-business and Internet statistics, benchmarks its quarterly ad spending projections on actual spending numbers from the Interactive Advertising Bureau/PricewaterhouseCoopers Internet Ad Revenue Report.

Among other factoids Ramsey shared yesterday: High-speed Internet access is expected to reach 40 million households by 2005, according to an eMarketer estimate. And, some 34 million kids and teens are online.