SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

According to the Advertising Forecast from Kagan Research, the Internet, interactive TV and satellite radio will be the major drivers of growth for U.S. ad revenues.

Via ClickZ:

The Internet remains the strongest-gaining sector in advertising, averaging 57 percent growth per year over the past 10 years. In 2005, the channel increased by 24 percent. New channels experiencing the most growth last year include satellite radio (235 percent) and interactive TV (116 percent).

Revenues from more traditional channels experienced lower rates of increase. In 2005, total ad revenue, including traditional and interactive channels, grew by 3.9 percent to reach $240 billion. Ad revenues are expected to reach $400 billion by 2015

Even traditional advertising media is positioning itself to take advantage of it.

Traditional sectors like TV have made moves to hold onto ad dollars; many traditional media are creating properties on the Internet.

This via Search Engine Journal, where Comscore releases its latest report on internet usage:

that 694 million people, age 15+, used the Internet worldwide from all locations in March 2006, representing 14 percent of the world’s total population within this age group.

Interestingly, it measures the usage of Asian countries including China:

Notably, comScore World Metrix includes measurement of the major Asian countries, including China, Japan, India and Korea, which represent nearly 25 percent of the total worldwide online population (or 168.1 million users), and which, in the aggregate, are 11 percent larger than the U.S. (152 million users).

“Today, the online audience in the U.S. represents less than a quarter of Internet users across the globe, versus ten years ago when it accounted for two-thirds of the global audience,” said Peter Daboll, president and CEO of comScore Media Metrix. “This is a sea change of enormous proportion, and comScore is pleased to be able to provide measurement to aid the world’s largest marketers in understanding how the world uses the Internet.

Imagine marketing to China where the usage is booming. According to Bloggers Blog, China:

will have over 60 million bloggers by the end of 2006 and 100 million in 2007. China has 110 million web users so over half of them will have blogs.

Time for me to brush up on my Chinese!

Dennis Forbes conducted some fascinating research on domain availability recently. It reveals just how “difficult” it is to obtain a really good, short, meaningful domain name.

As the graph below indicates, 2 and 3-letter domain names are unavailable with four letter domains almost 80% snapped up. Whatever’s left are usually a sequence of letters and numbers put together that mean little to most people.

And, what about the average length of a domain? The most popular, it seems, is around 11 characters long.

This is certainly great data to take into consideration when looking for that perfect domain name. Makes you think twice about spending hours/days trying to find those 3 and 4 letter domain names only to realize that all the good ones you want have already been taken.