Here's the The Lowdown from DNJournal.com! Updated daily to fill you in on the latest buzz going around the domain name industry!

In the face of all of the dire predictions for 2009 we're going to kick off 2009 with some good news. The success of many domain and website owners is based on online ad spending. By all accounts, ad budgets in general will be slashed in 2009, with one exception. You guessed it - online. BusinessWeek Magazine's Jeffrey Rayport explained what is going on in a new article this week titled Why Online Ads Are Weathering the Recession.

Rayport wrote, "Barclays Capital lowered its projections for U.S. ad spending to a negative 10% next year...Every one of the traditional media platforms is getting hit, with newspapers taking the brunt of the pressure, with a drop of 17%, followed by TV (minus 15.5%), magazines (minus 15%), and radio (minus 13%). The only bright spot this time is online advertising, which, despite a series of downward revisions, is still expected to grow between 6% and 10% next year over 2008 levels."

Any sector that can grow at that rate in the face of the biggest financial storm in decades has something going for it. Certainly, one could easily get depressed with the steady stream of bad news we see each

day, but you can rest assured that the future belongs to the sector you operate in - the Internet.  

Rayport closed his must read piece by predicting that this recession will forever change the way Madison Avenue does business. Rayport wrote, "Why would advertisers budget on faith when they could invest in measurable returns? Why would brands lavish dollars on mass media when they could target only those consumers who matter most? Why would marketers continue to allocate less than 10% of their budgets to interactive (in measured media), when consumers are spending more than 35% of their time with interactive platforms even today? It's not that online advertising will supplant traditional media. It won't. But a new and different ad equilibrium will emerge from the coming economic recovery—and it will represent a radical shift from anything we've known before."  

Keep in mind that those comments come from someone employed by a traditional media outlet, but obviously not someone who has his head buried in the sand. 
(Posted Jan. 2, 2009)