The home pages of Yahoo! Inc., Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN are sold out on big display ads for months in advance, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The selling of ads in advance, as well as the rising costs of online ad units, marks the shift of ad dollars from TV and print media to the web.
AOL says prices for some ad units have increased as much as 20 percent since January 2005. MSN says it charges between several hundred thousand dollars and $1 million for a prime, 24-hour ad spot on its home page, the WSJ reported.
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that U.S. advertising spending online increased by 26 percent to $5.8 billion in the first half of 2005.
"I think that the looming inventory crisis will drive two changes to occur with online media; one is already in the works, the other is something that I’ve talked about and written about many times, but has yet to gain real traction: 1) the focus for major online media properties will be more on content and programming, the kinds of things that will make them destinations and keep audiences within those properties’ confines for longer periods of time and 2) alter the way we look at online media currency, looking to sell inventory representative of time spent with the content or maybe a kind of audience “rate base” rather than the mass of blind impressions that are currently exchanged as online ad inventory," says Jim Meskauskas, iMedia contributor.
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