The State of Online Marketing by Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book, January 1, 2006 By the time Revenue magazine hit newsstands in January 2004, performance marketing and affiliate marketing had already had their share of ups and downs. Online marketing had survived the dot-com bust and continued to evolve from the e-commerce craze into something that sparked enthusiasm and life in a shell-shocked market. The idea that retirees, housewives and those with “real jobs” could work at home a few hours a day (or into the wee hours of the night) and make some extra money earning commissions by promoting products from someone else seemed too good to be true. But it wasn’t. And in many cases, people weren’t just supplementing their income, online marketing had become their main source of income. They were able to quit their day jobs and focus on their new business. Revenue was born out of that passion and enthusiasm to help chronicle, sort out, explain, educate and bring to light all the pertinent issues facing online marketers. We’ve been here for two years now, and we hope to be here for many more as the market remains on its incredible growth trajectory. To celebrate our milestone, we’ve brought together some research, voices from the industry and past history. It just may help you navigate your continuing journey into online marketing. Search is hot. Local search is even hotter. The areas of podcasting and blogging are white hot. Then there are predications for growth in ad spending over the next year. There’s no lack of research to show that all segments of online marketing are going strong and getting stronger. The facts, the figures, the surveys and the data all point to a future filled with opportunities for online marketers. We bring you some of the key indicators (see page 58). And if you’re still not convinced how the market will shape up, you can forget the numbers and go right to those in the trenches. We asked online marketing leaders to give their opinions on how things have evolved over the last two years, an update on where the online market is right now and where it’s headed. There are comments from a lot of different types of folks, all with different jobs and all with their own perspectives, but the optimism about online marketing is a common thread among them (see page 60). If you’re wondering how businesses adapt and survive in such a rapidly changing marketplace, look no further than the “5 Who Thrived.” These are five individuals we profiled in our premiere issues because they had already carved out some early success in the affiliate space. We revisit each of these folks and find they all have been able to roll with the punches and not only survive but thrive. Actually, they’ve all grown their respective businesses and have no plans to rest on their laurels (see page 62). Finally, Revenue magazine has worked hard to stay on top of the constantly evolving online marketing space. And along the way we’ve made some changes in the look of the magazine as well as how we handled the editorial content. Take a stroll down memory lane with us as we revisit each of our past issues (see page 64). Facts & Figures Online Retail Sales Online sales were $96 billion in 2003 and are expected to reach $230 billion by 2008 (10 percent of all U.S. retail sales). Source: Forrester Research Online retail sales in the third quarter of 2005 reached $23.32 billion – 26.7 percent more than the $17.6 billion for the same period of 2004. Source: The Census Bureau of the U.S. Department of Commerce The proportion of online retail sales to total retail sales reached 2.3 percent in the third quarter of 2005, compared with 2 percent in the third quarter of 2004. Source: The Census Bureau of the U.S. Department of Commerce Online Ad Revenues Total revenues for 2005 are expected to reach $12 billion, a 25 percent increase over 2004’s final tally of $9.6 billion. Source: Interactive Advertising Bureau Total U.S. online advertising and marketing spending will reach $14.7 billion in 2005, a 23 percent increase over 2004. It’s forecast to reach $26 billion (8 percent of total ad spending) by 2010. Source: Forrester Research Eighty-four percent of marketers had plans to increase U.S. online ad budgets in 2005. Source: Forrester Research Almost half of marketers plan to decrease spending in traditional advertising channels like magazines, direct mail and newspapers to fund an increase in online ad spending in 2005. Source: Forrester Research Display advertising, which includes traditional banners and sponsorships, will grow at the average rate of 11 percent over the next five years to $8 billion by 2010. Source: Forrester Research Search Engines Forty-one percent of 1,577 Internet users surveyed in September and October reported that they had visited a search engine the previous day. That is up from 30 percent in June 2005. Source: The Pew Internet & American Life Project Search is the second most popular task on the Web with 41 percent. Email still leads the list with 52 percent of U.S. Web users saying they had sent or received email on the day before being surveyed this fall. Source: The Pew Internet & American Life Project Users average 24 minutes a day on email, compared with less than 4 minutes for search. Source: comScore Media Metrix Search engine marketing will grow by 33 percent in 2005, reaching $11.6 billion by 2010. Source: Forrester Research The Big Three Yahoo’s third-quarter 2005 marketing services revenue grew 46 percent, to $1.16 billion, from $797 million in third-quarter 2004. Ad revenues at America Online increased to $324 million in the third quarter, marking a 28 percent leap from 2004. And Google saw third-quarter revenues surge to $1.578 billion – a 96 percent leap from the third quarter of 2004. Source: Company information Keywords The average “cost per keyword” increased from $20 in July to $26 in September 2005. Source: Performics Keyword costs for the words kitchen, food and wine-related terms went up 8 percent in the third quarter of 2005. Prices for keywords about apparel and accessories rose 10 percent during the same period. Source: SEMphonic Travel Among the 35 million consumers searching for travel, nearly one-third purchased a travel-related service either online or offline within the eight weeks following the initial search. Among these buyers, 80 percent completed travel purchases online. Source: comScore Networks, Yahoo and Media Contacts Only 20 percent of all travel transactions linked to search engine activity occurred directly following the initial search referral, while the remaining 80 percent took place in the days and weeks following the initial search session. Source: comScore Networks, Yahoo and Media Contacts Over the last year, Merrill Lynch reported that direct travel supplier sales increased 27 percent compared to 19 percent for online travel agencies. Travel search engines were driving direct supplier sales and accounted for $600 million in direct bookings last year. Source: Merrill Lynch Youth Nearly 60 percent of children ages 6 to 11 go online at least once a month, and about one in 12 goes online daily. Source: Mediamark Research Forty-four percent of teens have purchased something online. Teens spent an average of $73 on their last online purchase. Source: Teen Research Unlimited Music Apple Computer’s iTunes music store now sells more music than Tower Records or Borders. Apple has maintained more than 70 percent of the PC-based digital music download market throughout 2005. Source: The NPD Group Digital music sales accounted for slightly more than 4 percent of the market during the first half of 2005, up from about 1.5 percent during t he first half of 2004. Source: The Recording Industry Association of America Gambling Worldwide online gambling revenues will top $10 billion in 2005, up from $8.5 billion in 2004. Source: eMarketer In July 2005, 30 million U.S. Internet users (18 percent of all Internet users) visited gambling sites. This is comparable to the number of Internet users who visit retail music sites and is double the number who visited gambling sites in December 2001. Source: comScore Media Metrix Local Local online advertising has more than tripled since 2000, going from just over $1 billion to more than $4 billion. Source: Borrell Associates More than 26.3 million online users had visited a top 15 classifieds site in September – 80 percent more than the 14.6 million in the year-ago period. Source: The Pew Internet & American Life Project Blogs, Podcasting and RSS Sixty-four percent of respondents are interested in advertising on blogs; 57 percent through RSS and 52 percent on mobile devices, including phones and PDAs. Source: Forrester Research An estimated 5 million people will have downloaded podcasts in 2005, compared with just 820,000 in 2004. That figure is expected to reach critical mass in 2010 with 62.8 million users. Source: Bridge Ratings Newspapers Almost one in four U.S. Internet users now reads online versions of newspapers. Source: Nielson//NetRatings More than 39 million unique Internet users visited newspaper websites in October 2005, up 11 percent increase from the previous year, and more than three times the year-overyear increase of overall Internet users. Source: Nielson//NetRatings Video Spending for Internet video advertising in the U.S. will nearly triple in 2007 to $640 million from 2005’s $225 million. Source: eMarketer Navel Gazing In the Trenches The Past What’s been the biggest change in affiliate marketing over the last 24 months? How could it be ANYTHING but Google AdWords? – Seth Godin, Marketing Expert, Author The biggest change we have seen is the surge of search-enabled affiliates. – Joe Speiser, Co-founder, AzoogleAds.com Google’s AdSense altered the pay-for-performance landscape forever! – Beth Kirsch, Group Manager, Affiliate Programs, LowerMyBills.com The negative campaign against ad-ware and the declining conversion of email marketing. -Michael Stark, President, PostYourProperty.com We saw more big players entering this industry, both good and bad, and the many different ways they capture the attention of the search engines and visitors. – Greg Rice, Affiliate Program Manager, Commerce Management Consulting LLC Gone are the days of putting a banner into rotation or some text links and waiting for revenue. Professionals realize that generating real revenue can only happen when they master the advanced toolsets available. – Wayne Porter, Associate Editor, ReveNews The demand for ethical marketing practices by networks, affiliates and merchants. Affiliate managers today aren’t just remarked upon because of how well they grow a program, but also how well they police that program. – Chris Sanderson, Marketing and Affiliate Partner Manager, Mondera.com The Present What’s been the greatest development in online marketing during the last 2 years? The need to be transparent. If you lie, you get nailed. – Seth Godin Complete and total domination of the search channel. – Beth Kirsch The emergence of blogs/RSS being leveraged by affiliate marketers has opened up a new frontier of quality, content-based real estate for affiliate ads. – Shawn Collins. President and CEO, Shawn Collins Consulting Probably the intelligence that can be built into online advertising. Intelligent advertising can be presented when the likelihood of a sale is at hand. – Greg Rice The rise in popularity of blogs and RSS feeds combined with the availability of contextual advertising technologies like Google AdSense. – Adam Viener, President and CEO, IM Wave There has been a turnaround in attitude on the part of media buyers. They have learned to trust the medium again and are bringing the dollars back. – Dana Todd, Executive Vice President, SiteLab Describe the state of online marketing right now. Still chaos, because people haven’t figured out how to regularly and consistently test and measure. – Seth Godin Online marketing is here to stay, but it’s much too early to predict the methods we will use to market in the next couple of years. Truly disruptive innovations are yet to happen. – Elizabeth Cholawsky, Vice President, Marketing ValueClick The current state of online can be best summed up as The Second Coming! – Michael Stark The industry is very young still and needs time to mature and develop rules and regulations to play by. – Brian Littleton, President, ShareASale.com Exciting and fun! The shift from offline to online spend that we all have been talking about in the past 10 years is happening. – Ola Edvardsson, CEO, Performancy The key issues are confusion and consumer trust. Some consumers are becoming so turned off by the Internet pollution it hurts e-commerce as a whole and our emerging global community. – Wayne Porter Crowded, chaotic and filled with confusion. A massive cleanup is needed to sort out the bogus from the real and make it easier for legitimate firms to do business in an environment of trust. – Chris Sanderson The Future What are the largest hurdles for online marketing going forward? Standardization of data is a significant challenge. Until we can make it simpler to run online campaigns effectively, we’re excluding the small and medium businesses from full participation. – Dana Todd Enhancing customer trust and redefining online marketing ideology. The gap between reach and budgets will decrease and success-based models will be the future. – Holger Kamin, Executive Account Director & Special Projects RoW, Zanox Marketers must allow the consumer to choose which advertisements they would like to see anytime and anywhere. – Elizabeth Cholawsky Unreasonable client demands combined with impatience. – Seth Godin Once the major ad agencies fully embrace the Internet and its measurement and performance benefits, then the industry will really explode. – Joe Speiser Strategically, to bridge the gap between traditional brand/media advertising with the means to track and measure the ROI of online marketing. More tactically, to clean up the sleaze factor of online marketing including hammering the nail in the coffin on the spyware and spam issues. – Beth Kirsch I think we’ll see some overzealous enforcement of current and future laws related to email, adware and online advertising in general. Plus, there’s always the bogeyman of an Internet sales tax being enforced across the board. – Shawn Collins The constant abuse of the end user experience. As a marketer you always need to ask yourself: Is what I am doing really benefiting the end user? Is this the way I would like to be treated myself? The Golden Rule does apply in online marketing as well. – Ola Edvardsson Trying to make sure that we don’t behave so badly that the government steps in with strict regulation on tracking technologies. – Brian Littleton Where do you expect online marketing to be two years from now? The separation between online and offline advertising will begin to blur. Online methodology will do minate and make the growth in online advertising appear even more dramatic than just the numbers would suggest. The handwriting is on the wall. – Elizabeth Cholawsky There will be fewer players, but they will be the more sophisticated, rule-abiding marketers that stick around through 2007. – Shawn Collins I think we will see far more sophisticated tools, better analytics and an emphasis on Web services. – Wayne Porter Online marketing will become a science of sorts. Since we’re able to track everything that happens online, we’ll see more companies focusing on analytics. – Rachel Honoway, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, KowaBunga Who Thrived In our premiere issue we noted only about one in 50 affiliates finds real success. We profiled five affiliates who had beaten the odds. Now, two years later, we look at what’s happened to each of them over the last 24 months and what they’re up to now. Rosalind Gardner WHEN WE FIRST MET: Gardner had just finished writing her book, The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online, and she was running Sage-Heart.com, an online dating service. She was making about $30,000 to $50,000 a month and had the business running to the point that she only needed to spend a few hours per month to keep it going. WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW: In addition to being a columnist (Affiliate’s Corner), Gardner has been very busy with many projects. She’s working on more books – one is about how to make money selling books online. In the future she’d like to write books that have nothing to do with Internet marketing. But for now, she’s very in demand in the affiliate community. Gardner is consulting on a regular basis, speaking at high-profile conferences and seminars including Affiliate Summit and Affiliate Bootcamp, and building several affiliate sites. Of course, Sage-Heart.com is still her bread-and-butter site, but she claims that NetProfitsToday.com, the site where she offers affiliate advice and a newsletter and sells her Super Affiliate Handbook, is taking up more of her time. She has what she calls a “virtual assistant,” but he only puts in an hour or so of work each day. Gardner recently started a forum on NetProfitsToday.com – something she had consciously avoided in the past, due to the huge amount of time forums require for monitoring, removing spam comments and just generally keeping things rolling. The good news is that Gardner gets to unwind a little more. These days she works like a fiend for a stretch then heads off to China or Mexico for several weeks of rest and relaxation. Wendy Shepherd WHEN WE FIRST MET: Shepherd was a mom to three boys by day and a super-affiliate at night, working five to eight hours running her flagship site, TipzTime.com, plus a half dozen other retail merchandise sites. She was making about $40,000 a year and sending out her popular opt-in newsletter to more than 30,000 people. WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW: Shepherd’s load certainly hasn’t lightened over the last two years. She’s still super busy home-schooling her boys, running two main sites (TipzTime.com and ChartJungle.com) along with about a dozen others and working into the wee hours of the morning. However, she has tripled her revenues of two years ago; she’s working on a top-secret unique site that will be launched later this year; and she’s thinking about hiring someone to help out with the Web development end of her growing business. In addition, her husband stepped down from his managerial role at his job and is now working only about 30 hours instead of 50 or more. That means there’s a little more family time, which is more important than money or business, according to Shepherd, who admits that she never has time to be bored. Shepherd has been asked to speak at industry conferences and seminars, but declined – mostly because, she says, she “just can’t travel right now.” Meanwhile, she’s also contemplating writing a couple of books in the near future. She wants to help and encourage others. Zac Johnson WHEN WE FIRST MET: Johnson started his first Internet business at the age of 14 in 1997 selling website banners for $1. By 2004 Johnson was signing up people for free stuff like catalogs, coupons and samples on his site MoneyReignNetwork.com. He was also working with PostMasterDirect.com to push newsletter subscriptions by collecting names, addresses and email addresses through a double opt-in system. His income was in the low six figures. WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW: Johnson’s MoneyReignNetwork.com site was recently redesigned and expanded to include more than a half dozen websites focused on games, celebrities, entertainment and community. He’s out of the email and newsletter business and more into building traffic through viral marketing. About a year ago he tried his hand at launching an ad network, but closed it quickly. A few of his new sites have cracked Alexa’s top 10,000 ranking. Johnson, who spends a “ridiculous amount of time working,” says 2006 will “easily be his best income year to date” as he prepares to add a couple of new sites to his growing stable. Elisabeth Archambault WHEN WE FIRST MET: After quitting her part-time job as a technical writing instructor, Archambault opened her flagship site (BuckWorks.com), a virtual mall that sold everything from auto parts to prom dresses. Her revenue was going up and down, depending on the month, but she claimed in a bad month she might make $3,000 and then make something in the low five figures in a good month. WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW: Archambault continues to operate BuckWorks.com, but now it’s just one of nearly a dozen active sites she runs. She has expanded into areas beyond consumer shopping, and another site, which she won’t name, has become her money maker. Archambault also owns over 1,200 domain names along with a huge file of “great ideas.” In November she traveled to four cities and was able to conduct much of her online affiliate business. Her goal is to set up her business so she can completely run it from anywhere. Meanwhile, she’s doing more affiliate consulting work, which accounts for 20 to 30 percent of her business. She’s been so busy that she has turned down requests to speak at various industry conferences. Ulrich Roth WHEN WE FIRST MET: Living in the Canary Islands, Ulrich was running Last-Minute-Reisen-Weltweit.de, a travel service offering vacation packages, flights, rental cars, cruises and vacation homes. A native of Germany, he focused on the German travel market and was earning $150,000 per year, with monthly revenues ranging from $10,000 to over $20,000 at peak season. WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW: Last-Minute-Reisen-Weltweit.de is still up and running and lists Roth as the contact. There is also a photo of Roth on the site’s landing page. However, he did not respond to attempts to reach him via telephone and email. The site continues to cater to German travelers and offers various last-minute travel packages to such exotic destinations as Ibiza, Mallorca, Turkey, Spain and Portugal. Filed under: Revenue Tagged under: 09 - January/February 2006, affiliate marketing, Columns, Cover Story, Industry Trends, Lifestyle, mtadmin About the Author Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book Chris Trayhorn is the Chairman of the Performance Marketing Industry Blue Ribbon Panel and the CEO of mThink.com, a leading online and content marketing agency. He has founded four successful marketing companies in London and San Francisco in the last 15 years, and is currently the founder and publisher of Revenue+Performance magazine, the magazine of the performance marketing industry since 2002.