A look at the numbers
The Internet is a lucrative place for business. A huge portion of human population spends a substantial portion of their time on it every single day. Many of them use the Net to conduct transactions. Yet, there is a massive pool of people who just browse the Net, read or watch stuff, and not much more. And they are a very lucrative bunch to attract over the Net. Yes, we are talking about Internet advertising. Advertisers have an interactive and medium of thousands and thousands of pages seen by thousands of thousands of people. An advertiser’s dream you might say.
This is why we see astounding numbers for internet advertising today. The amount of money spent on Internet advertising stood at $7 billion in the United States in 2003. In 2008, this number stood at $21 billion.
$21 billion is a lot of money and a big portion of this was spent on advertising on search engines. This is where most search engines make their revenues, advertising.
The flowchart gives you an idea of the split in numbers. About 40% of the $21 billion spent in online advertising is spend with search engines. The remaining 60% is spread between money spent on display ads and banner ads placed on websites, and on classified advertising and email advertising.
But our area of concern is really how the search engines do it.
