Skip to main content

Local Search and Online Classified Ad Boom

Growth in tradition local advertising -- including classifieds and print Yellow Pages -- will be flat or negative in the coming five years, but advertising in the online version of the same media will grow significantly, according to a new forecast by the Kelsey Group.

The group is predicting that local search, including online Yellow Pages, will grow 30.5 percent, to $13 billion in 2010. Interactive classifieds are projected to grow 7.9 percent per year to reach $21.1 billion in that same time, from $14.4 billion in 2005. Print Yellow Pages revenues will grow by just 1.5 percent to $28.4 billion, while global offline classifieds will drop by .2 percent to $78.5 billion, by 2010.

"The traditional products, the newspaper classifieds, and print Yellow Pages are going to see flat or negative growth, and negative growth in the case of classifieds," said Kelsey Group Analyst Greg Sterling. "We're going to see a trend towards more performance media, where value is proven and self-evident to the advertiser, and that's the influence of Internet on traditional marketing."

Kelsey also predicted very high annual growth for pay-per-call: 130 percent annually, reaching $3.7 billion in 2010, from $57 million in 2005. Sterling said that the product would likely begin to appear in print publications as well as online -- such as the recently announced deal between pay-per-call firm Jambo and LA Weekly. "It's interesting to a broad cross-section of advertisers," he said. "I think that we're going to see pay-per-call in the newspapers. I think we'll see it as a way to retain advertisers."

Popular posts from this blog

Why Europe's AI Investment Surge is Strategic

When enterprises begin treating AI budget as the line item they protect last when cutting elsewhere, the market has crossed a threshold that analysts rarely name explicitly. That is precisely where Europe now stands. A new forecast from IDC projects European AI spending will reach nearly $470 billion by 2030, expanding at a 35 percent CAGR over the next five years. European enterprises are allocating capital toward AI because the operational returns on cost efficiency, risk mitigation, and resilience are now demonstrable enough to justify sustained budget commitment. The strategic implication is significant: AI has moved from the innovation portfolio into core operational infrastructure. European AI Market Development Generative AI solutions, already embedded across enterprise deployments, are expected to account for more than 55 percent of the total market by the end of the forecast period.  Software is both the largest technology segment, at 54.9 percent of total spending in 2026...