The online ad slowdown may be far more a perception than a reality.
    Scratching the surface one finds a slowing down in the rate of growth for online advertising, yet real growth continues at a healthy pace.
    Also continuing apace is the number of new advertisers coming online, according to new data from Leading Web Advertisers, an online ad measurement firm.
    Tallying the number of brands making their debut on the web during the first three months of 2001, Leading Web Advertisers counted 7,927 for the first 13 weeks of 2001.
    During the same period in 2000, there were 6,143 new brands advertising on the web, according to LWA data.
    That makes for an increase of 29 percent, all coming very much after the dot.com bubble burst.
    "Internet advertising isn’t decreasing in volume, it’s the rate of growth that’s dropped," says LWA co-founder and co-CEO Michael Kubin. "And those companies that staffed for much faster growth have gotten hurt."
    Kubin considers any week with at least 500 new brands coming online to be a reasonably healthy one. There was only one during the first quarter—the week of Feb. 19 through Feb. 25—where the number dipped slightly below, to 472, and that was a holiday week with President’s Day on the 19^th.
    Two weeks later, the number of new brands online for the week skyrocketed to 1,123. A number that high coming in the midst of lower numbers is an aberration, according to Kubin, who notes that a big blip like that seems to happen every so often for no particularly meaningful reason.
    On America Online, which LWA tracks separately, the trend is more or less the same. The growth rate is down from the fall—there were as many as 60 new brands on AOL for a few different weeks between October and December. But the pace is still strong and has been improving since mid-February, compared to where it was during January and early February.
    LWA tracks all brands that are new to the internet within 24 hours of an ad’s first appearance. The company tracks advertising on more than 2,800 of the web’s largest ad-supported sites, as well as America Online, at least once a day. Its database contains information on 80,000 brands and advertisers.
    LWA data should expose as fabrication once and for all Michael Eisner’s now-famous assertion, as Disney announced the shutdown of Go.com, that advertisers have "abandoned" the internet.
   "I guess one just shouldn’t trust the opinion of a man who hangs out with a talking mouse," says Kubin.

April 18, 2001 © 2001 Media Life

-Jeremy Schlosberg is the senior editor for new media.

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