Yesterday, I posted about Piper Jaffray’s local numbers and forecast. Two days ago, I pointed to this article showcasing the differences between Jupiter and Borrell’s local forecasts. And today the Kelsey Group released its annual forecast. Here’s the MediaPost article providing some color (numbers used are global). The numbers have been scaled back by roughly $2 billion vs. a year ago (on a global basis).
Growth rates from local Internet media will outpace overall online ad growth because it has taken longer to get what I refer to as the “infrastructure” in place.
So if you’re raising money or a marketer talking to the WSJ, you want the most bullish one. And if you’re doing an internal revenue projection, you want the most conservative one. The competing numbers are partly a function of dueling and differing definitions of the local market, which makes apples to apples comparisons very challenging.
I’ll have much more to say on all this in a couple weeks.
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Related: Here’s a Kate Kaye ClickZ article riffing off the Kelsey forecast. Matt Booth, who now runs the ILM program there that I used to run is quoted as saying that “it’s so early in this game . . .”
I agree that it’s still early but I don’t think it’s a “greenfield” — at least on the consumer side. There is momentum and there are barriers to entry. As the former CEO of one of the better known local sites told me yesterday, because of the dominance of search engines and several established players it’s hard for new entrants to come into the market and get traffic.
