A few months ago at the @dTech show, when eMarketer’s Geoff Ramsey showed an ad covering up almost all of CNNfn’s homepage, people in the audience chuckled. Even though Geoff was talking about bigger banners achieving better results, a full-page ad was not something online ad execs were too enthusiastic about. Lack of enthusiasm doesn’t seem to have prevented the development of technology that makes really huge ads possible, though.

Is it me, or are Nielsen//NetRatings and Jupiter Media Metrix releasing an unusually high number of research reports since they decided not to merge? Regardless of their motives, Nielsen did announce some significant findings today. Their Fourth Quarter 2001 Global Internet Trends report on Internet access and penetration, says there are a total of 498 million people worldwide who now have Internet access from home.

Not that we needed final confirmation of 2001 being a horrible year for the advertising industry, but according to tallies released this morning by Taylor Nelson Sofres' CMR, ad spending took an even bigger hit in 2001 than originally forecast.

According to research by Taylor Nelson Sofres Information Technology, around nine out of ten companies in the US (93%) and UK (86%) are now using the Internet for activities such as CRM, marketing, order fulfillment and selling to deal with customers. In contrast, six out of ten (60%) organizations in Japan and fewer than four out of ten (36%) organizations in France are using the Internet as a marketing channel or customer service mechanism.

Sorry to pick the weekend to harp on something negative, but today’s topic is one advertisers should be paying more attention to. It’s the age-old issue of website functionality. mLife really brought it to the forefront when almost no one could get to their website following the Super Bowl, but now it looks like the main Olympics website didn’t really ensure that everyone can easily access their site either.

Nielsen//NetRatings today released its Global Internet Index for January, finding that the unique audiences for Google, Ask Jeeves, and European directory, portal and service provider Wanadoo showed the biggest percentage increases last month among the top 25 global properties, jumping 12 to 13% over December.

Today’s hot topic seems to be yesterdays’ webcast of the latest Arbitron/Edison study of consumer attitudes toward streaming content. Not surprisingly, the study revealed that approximately nine million consumers who have ever listened to Internet audio would be willing to pay a small fee to listen to the one audio channel they listen to most online.

Now that the Olympics are over, the ad world is anxiously awaiting the results of some ad campaigns that ran during the last two weeks both online and on NBC. Chances are the wait will be considerable, seeing how we’ve had to wait more than a month for results of some pre-Super Bowl campaigns.

I know this is not directly related to online advertising, but today there seem to be a lot of announcements of celebrities in the ad world.

Nielsen//NetRatings reports that the two official Olympic sites, NBCOlympics.com and Olympics.com, jumped in traffic at-work during the week ending February 17, leading to the ladies' figure skating finals last night.