Internet Advertising growing at 35% y/y

IAB reports today that Internet Advertising in 2006 grew by 35% over 2005 to $17B. Display advertising grew fastest y/y at 47%; classifieds grew 44%; keyword search grew 32%. Market share breakdown:

• Display Advertising 22% – $3.75B (y/y growth: 47%)
• Rich media display advertising 7% – $1.19B
• Keyword search 40% – $6.8B (y/y growth: 32%)
• Classifieds 18% – $3.06B (y/y growth: 44%)
• Lead generation 8%

Mobile Search User Behavior

Google mobile search user behavior analysis was published in this interesting paper. Some key behavioral findings were as follows:

• Average number of words per query were roughly same b/w mobile & regular searches: roughly 2.3 words/query.
• Surprisingly 17% of queries the authors looked at were URLs. The number is much much lower (1-2%) for regular search logs.
• Top categories: in cellphone based searches, “adult” was the top category (>20% of searches); Entertainment (>10%), Internet & Telecom (>5%), Local Services (5%) and Games (>2%) round out the top-5. The interpretation was that since a cellphone is considered a very private device, people look for more adult content than a computer, which may be used by multiple people.
• Top categories in PDA-based searches differed: local services (>15%) was the most preferred category due to probably the profile of the user–business users. Entertainment, Computers & Technology, Internet& Telecom, Travel, Adult, and Sports each account for ~5% of queries.
• Query distribution: the top-1000 queries on cell phone based search accounted for 22% of all queries, whereas it was 6% for regular search. This shows that cell based search has less variety in queries currently.
• Number of queries/session in mobile was 1.6 whereas it was b/w 2 and 3 in regular search. It takes about a minute for a user to enter a query in mobile search! This fatigue could be the reason for searching less, but being specific (same # words/query in mobile as regular search) at the same time.
• About 32% of consecutive searches are the same; 29% of consecutive searches are refinements of original query; 14% are spellcheck triggers. So the remaining 25% are not on the same topic. This suggests that mobile search is very focussed and is not exploratory in nature.

Summary: mobile searches roughly have same # of words/query as regular search; number of queries per session is much less than regular search; people often focus their searches and explore less while mobile. It currently takes too long to input search queries, which may be limiting the # of queries/session.

Speed of data transfer over Internet

Jonathan Schwartz of SUN has an interesting back-of-the-envelope calculation for how long it will take to move a petabyte of data from Sanfrancisco to Hong Kong over the Internet. He estimates 507 years at 1/2 MB/sec connection speeds. So it is easier to send it by sailboat he reckons!

In my own experience, we sent a box of indexed blog data tapes from US west-coast to east-coast by overnight shipping rather than over the Internet’s pipes, which would have taken a week at a minimum.