Google+ has already come up with a number of clients, who have asked me basic questions about it.  So I found this presentation (see below), which contains everything you needed to know about Google+ but ‘were afraid to ask’.

After the initial launch euphoria, many people have criticised Google+. I think it is a robust tool, but it is still to find its way into my daily routine. Nonetheless, I check it every day and it is full of promise. What is more, I do think Google+ will be a Flickr killer because of how it links so sweetly to Picasa, but we will have to wait and see if it will gain ground on Facebook.

Anyhow, this is a great ‘starter for ten.’ I hope it is useful.

This is one of seven bullet points lifted from post on Boing Boing. It’s about the impact of the internet on TV.

Clearly TV isn’t dying, it’s just the business model that is changing.

The shift in power which now makes internet advertising a bigger revenue stream than from broadcast media has come quicker than I thought.

The report seems very credible. Although I am always sceptical of ‘data’ from Newspaper Society and the Internet Advertising Bureau, this report seems to be an accurate picture.  

The fact that Britain is the first country to reach this tipping point is encouraging too.  It is not that often one feels like the UK is blazing a trail.

Full story is below.

Internet overtakes television to become biggest advertising sector in the UK
Record £1.75bn online spend makes UK first major economy to spend more on web ads than TV, says IAB

• Mark Sweney
• The Guardian, Wednesday 30 September 2009 02.16 BST

The UK has become the first major economy where advertisers spend more on internet advertising than on television advertising, with a record £1.75bn online spend in the first six months of the year.

The milestone marks a watershed for the embattled TV industry, the leading ad medium in the UK for almost half a century. It has taken the internet little more than a decade to become the biggest advertising sector in the UK.

UK advertisers spent £1.75bn on internet advertising in the six months to the end of June, a 4.6% year-on-year increase, according to a report by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. To put this in perspective, in 1998, when the IAB first measured internet advertising, just £19.4m was spent online.

The internet now accounts for 23.5% of all advertising money spent in the UK, while TV ad spend accounts for 21.9% of marketing budgets.

The IAB originally predicted that internet ad spend would overtake TV at the end of 2009; however, the crippling advertising recession accelerated this by six months. TV advertising fell about 17% year on year in the first half, to about £1.6bn, according to the report.

The IAB’s figures show that of the total of £1.75bn spent on internet advertising, £1.05bn, or 60%, was spent on search advertising on websites including Google, up 6.8% year on year.

Online classified advertising grew by 10.6% year on year to £385m, about 22% of total internet ad spend. But online display advertising, such as banners on websites, fell by 5.2% year on year, to £316.5m. This was an 18% share of all internet ad spend.

The ray of light within the online display ad sector was the nascent, but rapidly growing, online video advertising sector. The IAB estimated that this sector grew by close to 300% year on year, to almost £12m.

Thinkbox, the UK TV marketing body, has taken exception to the IAB’s figures, arguing that the internet is now mature and diverse and it is inaccurate to collate all the figures as if it is one single medium.

“It is interesting but meaningless to sweep all the money spent on every aspect of online marketing into one big figure and celebrate it,” said Lindsey Clay, marketing director at Thinkbox. “Online marketing spend is made up of many things, including email, classified ads, display ads (including online TV advertising) and, overwhelmingly, search marketing. They should be judged individually.”

Guy Phillipson, the chief executive of the IAB, reckoned that there is still significant growth potential left in the internet ad market.

“We could absolutely see it grow to being a 30% medium [of share of ad spend], to go past £4bn to even £5bn annually,” he said. “Online display advertising has plenty of room for growth.”

Despite the seemingly inexorable rise of internet ad spend, a closer examination of the IAB’s figures show that the recession has had an impact. In the first quarter £920m was spent on online advertising, representing 8.6% year-on-year growth. However, in the second quarter, spend fell almost £100m to £832m, representing only a 1.1% increase on the amount spent in the same period last year.

Adam Smith, futures director at WPP’s combined media operation Group M, argued that the internet’s share of total UK ad spend could be close to its peak.

Smith cited factors such as the increasing share of time that users spend on social networking websites, which have not attracted huge advertising spend, and the increasing saturation of internet penetration in the UK as potential limiting factors. “This day was bound to arrive, as the internet has been attracting a huge long tail of advertisers that have not advertised before doing completely new things,” he said. “It is a memorable event. However, it is a bit simplistic to make this comparison [and] it is always possible that internet’s share [of total UK ad spend] could go backwards if TV has a good year.”

The UK is not the first country where internet ad spend has overtaken TV spend, Denmark reached the milestone about six months ago. But it is the first major economy to do so

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A-Levels are getting easier.  Standards are slipping.  The education system is in crisis.

People seem to forget that the rise in grades over the last fifteen years seems to correlate with the creation of a truly formidable study aid.  The Internet.

‘When I was a lad’, revision happened in things called ‘libraries’.  I used revision ‘books’ and took past papers which were photocopied from previous papers.  I had to queue up to get these copies from a teacher in the staff room…

Finding knowledge and insight involved ploughing through books (if the library had them available).  

A computer was a ZX Spectrum and there was no such thing as email or search engines.

Yesterday I spent the day with a client and we are about to launch a set of online “learning objects” to help study with science.  This is another innovation we didn’t have ‘in my day’.

So before we all decry the performance of our youth, let’s take a moment and celebrate how as a society we have actually moved on in leaps and bounds, and be glad that our children will get better grades than us and that they won’t have to spend six weeks waiting for books, and poorly photocopied handouts.  They have the world’s knowledge at their fingertips!

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© James Crawford’s PR and Media Blog.  2009