CNNMoney.com reports that total ad spending fell 0.7 percent while online ad spending rose 16.7 percent in the first quarter. Television and radio both dropped over 2 percent but newspapers lost 5 percent of their ad spending.
The continuing transition from traditional media to the new digital communication medium is having larger impacts on society than sending Google shares soaring. The legal and ethical framework that control the way information is vetted and then conveyed via television, print, and radio simply don't work effectively online.
The ongoing implosion of the nation's newspapers is wrecking havoc on the traditional punditry. Fifty years ago, the vast majority of people read the Sunday paper and watched the evening news to get their information. Consequently, the information available to people was both much more homogeneous and significantly more limited. Now that a profusion of Internet news organizations and blogs offer more in-depth, more opinionated, and more questionable "news".
The information consumer of today is at once more informed and more misinformed than at any time in history. The ultimate effect of online communication is unambiguously positive, but the growing pains of the medium are potentially dangerous.
Companies like Yahoo stand to profit enormously from this long-term trend, but Google looks like the biggest near-term winner. With its unassailable lead in Internet search, Google controls the pathways most users travel to find information online. If no one defeats Google in its core business, Google will reach outward like a giant octopus to grasp for ad revenues across everything on the Internet. And while Google promises to do no evil, the temptation is only going to grow.
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