IAB Resources and Research would appear to the touchstone for compiling various predictions about year-to-year growth of online advertising.
Unfortunately — for me, since I need a solid prediction for ’06 now — the Internet Advertising Bureau is only showing estimates cooked up a year ago, and those include estimates for paid search, which by itself is arguably 25% of the category.
My worry working with expectations of growth in the high twenties and low thirty percent range, is two-fold:
1. Paid search shows no sign of slowing (save for some major click fraud discredit) and is, if one extrapolates Overture and Google Revenues, at least 20% of the spend and is not a space I play in).
2. The rapid rebound of spending between late 2003 and the present is widely predicted to flatten through the next four years and 2006, barring the development of a compellingly profitable new ad model accepted by marketers, could be the year that the CAGR starts to stagger.
