Online advertising: what lies ahead?

[Sam Barona]

mjohns, I am being very specific here in terms of adsense, not the other methods of online marketing/advertising.

Banner advertising suffered tremendously after an explosion of content sites all based on ad revenue and is now the reserve of the largest and/or those with very nice niches. Again, click throughs are not good so money flowed to email marketing.

Email marketing has gone down hill due to spamming and increasingly low opening rates (specially on emails sent to third party lists). Thus, money flowed to SEO.

SEO is currently the thing, but as more and more companies go online and it becomes more expensive to optimise, money flow (marketing budgets) are seeking pastures new, like video email (to increase CTs on opened emails); SMS, PodCasting and IPTV.

Adsense, in my view is also running into trouble due to an explosion of content driven/ad revenue centric sites, plus the poor qulity of the click throughs and CT fraud.

So, my question still stands; where do you think the money flow will go to next? will it flow towards those that Akula has shared here? If so, then how many of you are positioning your selves for this change?