Crenk » Analysis

Obama Never Used Twitter

Dean Sherwin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:28:28 +0000

Some of the most popular Twitter accounts (with followers well into the millions) come from well-known faces such as Ashton Kutcher and Stephen Fry. And of course, the president of the United States Barak Obama. He has over 2.6 million followers who will be disappointed to learn it’s not him behind the Twitter account.

I think everyone knew that he didn’t tweet all of the time but he actually said that he has ‘never’ used Twitter before!

It happened during a meeting with Chinese youth when somebody put a question to him about the freedom of the internet and information in China through networks such as Twitter. He then replied:

“I have never used Twitter but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access.”

To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if he got into a bit of trouble with his publicists who would have preferred to have people think he tweets. Oh well, half the celebrity Twitter accounts are fake anyway – at least this one is actually coming from somebody in the White House.

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates at CNBC Townhall

Steven Finch — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:53:07 +0000

Crenk PDF Released: 10 Minute Guide to the Blogosphere

Dean Sherwin — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:19:46 +0000

Here at Crenk we have decided that we’ll share our knowledge about technology and related subjects with you our readers. So we’ve released the first of what will be a collection of PDF manuals for you to enjoy. The first one is our Ten Minute Guide to the Blogosphere.

In it we detail such things like choosing you blogging platform, promoting your blog, using social networking for a blog and keeping your blog going once you’re over than initial hump.

It is available here to read free of charge.

Be sure to Tweet this post and share the PFD with your friends.

-Dean Sherwin

Author of Crenk PDF

The Internet Advertising Recession is Over

Dean Sherwin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:30:10 +0000

The other day here on Crenk with did a post about the major Internet giant Google buying AdMob - a mobile advertiser and we predicted that internet advertising was due to come up. Well it seems like it most definitely has – thanks to search.

Google reported the first rise in advertising revenue in over two quarters. The third quarter of 2009 stabilized the sector. However, as I mentioned above it was all due to the advertisements in the search results pages not so much the advertisements on websites.

While this is good news it’ll still be a while until the other advertisers such as AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft recover from the recession – these being the weakest of the search engines.

So it appears that the advertisements on web pages still aren’t doing as good as what they used to simply because there are less ‘big’ companies using them. As such, people don’t want to click on them. Crenk’s advice for bloggers and webmasters? Use Google AdSence to put advertisements on your website’s search page!

Google Acquires AdMob and Gizmo5, Plus Playfish Acquired by EA

Steven Finch — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:16:58 +0000

It has been a very big day in acquisitions for both Google and Accel partners. Google has announced that they have acquired Admob and Gizmo5. Admob is a mobile advertising network in which cost Google $750 million.

AdMob founder Omar Hamoui sent the following letter to customers:

Today we announced that AdMob has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google for $750 million. We are extremely excited about this new partnership and what it means for our advertiser, developer and publisher partners.

AdMob’s people, products and tools will continue to work to deliver successful campaigns for you and to effectively monetize your mobile traffic – no interruptions. Our product and engineering teams will keep building great products for our customers. Our sales team will keep working with our thousands of advertisers to deliver successful campaigns. Our business development team will keep working to maximize ad revenue for the more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and applications that make up AdMob’s publisher network.

After our deal closes, AdMob will work with Google to accelerate the pace of innovation in mobile and do an even better job for you. We believe this deal will benefit our advertisers, developers and publishers by:

*Increasing our investment in building innovative and engaging ad units across platforms and to further improve targeting and tracking.

*Building even more powerful relevance and optimization capabilities, and more powerful technology and tools to monetize mobile traffic.

*Increasing the effectiveness of display advertising on mobile devices by leveraging Google sales team, infrastructure and relationships.

*Improving the already high level of service and support we deliver to our advertisers, developers and publishers.

Im very surprised that Admob sold out to Google on this occassion. I know that $750 million is not an average sum of money, but with Googles track record of advertising products that aren’t Adsense is pretty terrible. Back in February 2007 Google purchased Adscape, which still hasn’t really taken their in-game advertising product to the next level. Additionally, Google killed Feedburner’s very profitable advertising network and replaced it directly with a much worse product for the type of market, Google Adsense. Accel partners won out big on this acquisition as they and Sequoia Capital were the early investors.

Gizmo5 Acquisition:

Gizmo5 was the other company in which Google purchased today, but for only around $30 million in cash. Gizmo5 is a VOIP infrastructure. In previous months Gizmo5 was in talks with Skype about a potential sale, mainly because Skype was having big issues with their current infrastructure. This is a very interested move for Google, I’m not entirely sure why they purchased VOIP infrastructure. The only possible solution is that they are thinking about tying it in with their current Google Voice offering.

EA purchase Playfish:

After lengthy negotiations, Electronic Arts closed it’s anticipated acquisition of social gaming startup Playfish for $275 million in cash. An additional $25 million in stock will be set aside for retaining the top talent at the startup, and another $100 million in earnouts are part of the deal as well if the business hits certain milestones. This has no reaffirmed how lucrative this market current is. I would not be surprised to see a Zynga IPO or Playdom acquistion in the first half of 2010.

Danish Give up on Fighting Piracy

Dean Sherwin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:59:02 +0000

The fight against piracy has been ongoing in Europe since late last year when countries such as the Netherlands started to ban Pirate Bay. In Ireland, the main ISP Eircom, limited internet access to just 20 minutes per day for any of their customers found using the service and the owners of Pirate Bay were wanted men in the Scandinavian countries.

However, it appears as though the Danes are now “throwing in the towel”.

The main reason for this is the lack of adequate evidence which they can use to prosecute. Because, in terms of the law, the internet and the piracy associated with it are fairly new, there are no constraining laws which make it easy to prosecute. As it stands now, if the defendants don’t actually admit to having being organisers in piracy then they’re free to go.

To be honest, I’m still waiting to see if there will ever be a real prosecution and take down of a main service – anywhere.

News Corp Strategy with Rupert Murdoch on Paid Content Online, Google, BBC and More.

Steven Finch — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:42:43 +0000

Great interview with Rupert Murdoch on the paid content, BBC, YouTube and more.

Facebook and Twitter to Fight SPAM… again

Dean Sherwin — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:51:56 +0000

SPAM is one of my pet hates. In fact I think that everyone reading this hates those annoying e-mails, comments left on our pages, tweets and clearly misleading advertisements that promise you a months salary in a few hours. I really, really hate SPAM. It’s useless and in this day and age it achieves nothing with its instantly recognisable language format, strange links and oh yeah, the promise of a few million bucks for transferring money.

Twitter and Facebook hate SPAM too. At the same time, both of them published posts to their blog that clearly announce plans to go on the offensive against spammers on their networks.

Twitter is due to start crating tweets and organising the trending topics section. This could mean one of two things:

Either they’ll simply remove an entire trending topic if it becomes too spammed.
Or they’ll painstakingly monitor tweets in trending topics with the first filter being a computer and the last a human.

They told us that the changes may not be apparent immediately – but I can assure you, it’s happening as you read this post.

Meanwhile, Facebook are targeting SPAM and scam ads on their network. This is a really big problem for two reasons. Firstly it lets users make their own ads and publish them – with so many it’s hard to catch all the scams. And secondly, they’ve gotten into bed with some shady advertising networks recently and are having a spot of bother breaking the relationships. Although they have assured us they’re in the process of ending two of them.

Let’s all pray for a SPAM free Internet in the mean time.

Google Wave Federation Begins Testing – Start of SPAM

Dean Sherwin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:20:59 +0000

Google Wave has not been a big hit so far – everyone though it would be…but it hasn’t. The interface is complicated, buggy and unpractical. People aren’t staying long enough to build a community and worst of all – nobody is quite sure what exactly it’s for yet. However the development team are still making strides.

They have just opened up Wave to third party companies by releasing an API package. This allows companies to host their own Wave like services on their own servers and interact with other companies API Waves. This is currently only in sandbox testing and isn’t live on the internet as of yet.

One thing which concerns me is that this could mean the start of SPAM on Wave. Since its launch people have been confined to specific waves but now we’re seeing a growth in access. Although this growth isn’t enough to start a spamming campaign it could be the start of it. I’m pretty sure that soon the hackers and spammers will descend on Google Wave – then it’s up to Google to stop them on a platform which will supposedly be more open than e-mail.

BBC Hacks Into GMail eMail Account over WIFI

Steven Finch — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:20:59 +0000

This article was just written over at TheNextWeb. I didnt want to just rewrite the article for everyone so here is what they said. I was wondering if anyone has any answers, mainly because this is a Gmail account and could affect millions of people.

BBC Watchdog is British TV program that investigates viewers’ reports of problematic experiences with traders, retailers, and other companies around the UK. A recent investigation has discovered that wi-fi hot spots across the country are not secure – leaving tens of thousands of users at risk of fraud.

In this particular case they reveal how easy it is to hack into someones GMail account over Wifi, sending emails and changing their password. According to Danny Sullivan who shared the link on Twitter, if he’d signed via secure https, he’d probably have been safe – can anyone verify?

If you can’t see the video below, watch it here.

Google Page Rank Update, But Does Anyone Care?

Steven Finch — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:37:38 +0000

Here at Crenk we have noticed that our page rank has gone up to a PR 5, and a lot of other people have also been writing about the update. However, does anyone still actually care about Page Rank? or is it now all about building a brand and hitting the long tail keywords?

Random Posts

New York Times Report That Online Advertising Brings in Nearly a Quarter Of Their Revenues

Steven Finch — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:37:47 +0000

Over at Techcrunch they reported yesterday that the New York Times are now receiving nearly a quarter of their total revenues from online advertising.

The New York Times announced third quarter earnings this morning. Total revenues were down 17 percent to $571 million. Of that advertising revenues decreased 27 percent to $291 million, and the online advertising portion was down 8.2 percent to $68 million.

Last quarter, advertising revenues declined an even steeper 32 percent, and online advertising was down 15.5 percent. So maybe this is the first step on its way back to positive territory. Here are the year-over-year declines in online advertising revenues for each of the past four quarters.

Annual Decline In Internet Advertising Revenues

4Q08: -3.5%
1Q09: -6.1%
2Q09: -15.5%
3Q09: -8.2%

Another interesting data point is that because its print advertising revenues are shrinking at a faster rate than its Internet advertising revenues, the Internet portion is actually a bigger percentage (23.5%) of the New York Times’ total advertising revenues than it was year ago (when it was 18.6%).

I have been a firm believer that print business will slowly leave only the major players in each market and all the smaller business will have to move online or close. However, with these latest figures I now think even the major players could be in big trouble!

Has Rivals Techcrunch and Silicon Alley Insider Partnered??

Steven Finch — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:03:55 +0000

I noticed this morning that in the Silicon Alley Insider RSS feed that they were not just promoting Techcrunch content, but linking directly to their articles!

Have these two key rival in the technology news space partnered to try to catch up to Mashable in terms of traffic numbers?

VoIP Applications in iTunes App Store, But Why Is There Still No Google Voice?

Steven Finch — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:17:16 +0000

It was just reported by Om Malik that Apple has approved yet another VoIP application. The application in question is Stockholm based Rebtel. Currently, Rebtel is now available to download from the iTunes store, as well as other VoIP applications like Skype.

Rebtel joins a growing rank of Internet telephony applications including Skype, Truphone, Nimbuzz, Fring and Vonage. Given that Apple and AT&T are giving the nod to almost all VoIP applications, Om wonders why exactly Google Voice isn’t getting the go-ahead?

I still think there is a distinctive difference between the VoIP service and what Google Voice offers. Google Voice offers free calls with no cost at all with the USA and Canada. However, on the VoIP service there is still a cost associated when calling phone numbers (only online calls are free). Thus, AT&T and other mobile carriers of the iPhone feel that VoIP services dont harm their call costs, because they think users are too lazy to open the VoIP applications then call, instead of just calling using their phone carrier.

Google Acquisitions and Investments Chart

Steven Finch — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:08:48 +0000

Our friends at The Next Web have put found a great chart of Google’s Acquisitions and Investments. Click here for a larger view.

Social Media Revolution

Augusto Alvarez — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 19:07:11 +0000

How much is Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google involved in your common day activities? Did you ever ask yourself that? Where would you be if those didn’t exist?

Well there thousands of those existential questions that you may or may not asked yourself, and there’s no need to get real philosophical about this, but we sure can be certain that those technologies, web apps and more have an important presence in most of our days.

About those presences, here’s a very interesting video about the facts of several of these social tools, technologies and media: “Social Media Revolution”

Here are some of the facts that caught my attention:

Social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web
1 of 8 couples married in the US met via social media
If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users, Facebook took less than 9 months to reach 100 millions
Ashton Kutcher has more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama
80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles
80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
35% of books sales on Amazon are for Kindle

“Social media isn’t a fad; it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate”

Brilliant New iPhone App: Girlfriend Not Included

Steven Finch — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:36:49 +0000

A new very funny iPhone ad but not from Apple. The movie is by New York artist Adam Sacks. via DivineCaroline

Feedburner CEO Moves to Twitter. Is Twitter The New RSS?

Steven Finch — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 22:10:43 +0000

It has been reported over at Techcrunch that the Feedburner CEO has decided to leave the ship and is now becoming the Twitter COO. This has really made me think about RSS and where it is heading and is Twitter the next big thing in terms of keeping track of your favourite resources?

Steve Gillmor stated:

“Rest In Peace, RSS,” he wrote, saying “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter…All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.”

Everyday I head over to my Google Reader and see what all the major sites have been talking about and for me there is simply no other alternative to easily read over 200 sites in one place. I know I can follow a lot of major sites on Twitter, but it is very difficult to keep track of more than 200 follows, plus you have to be online and watching when they post or you just miss the news (bad thing about real-time).

Why Do People Go Online?

Augusto Alvarez — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 01:18:34 +0000

Why do people go online? I know, it is a general question that could lead to several answers and also might depend on several factors as well, that also is dynamically changing according to the day or particular moment. But at Ruder Finn Intent Index are trying to simplify this question, analyzing common areas that men, women, youths and seniors could choose to go online.

The results are very interesting, here are some quick facts:

More than twice as many people go online to socialize (82%) than to do business (39%) or shop (31%).
72% of people go online just to become part of a community.
More men (42%) than women (36%) go online to do business.
Women (91%) are much more likely to go online to socialize than men (73%).
A majority of youths 55% go online to just to play games.
More than half of seniors (65%) go online to be a part of an online community.
Almost half (48%) go online to entertain others.

And even more, if you want you can also review the full results with more specific data.

How do they collect this data? Well this report is updated on quarterly basis, the sample is a minimum of 500 American adults. The index is calculated on the basis of how frequently this people is going online for 295 reasons or intents.

We’ve discussed before about how teenagers do not prefer twitter, and even though in the results shown in this site could be consider quite general, the statistics caught my attention:

82% go online to socialize. No surprise there, where it would be Facebook if that wasn’t true?
72% go online just to become part of a community. What can you say about it? Maybe a constant feeling of people to be included in some group, or self esteem issues?
55% of youths go online just to play games. Well I didn’t see that number coming, I was hoping around a 30% maybe? And the rest to socialize.
65% seniors go online to be a part of an online community. I’m not sure which age represents “seniors” but it is a great thing that elders are always trying to catch up with technology.

And what about you? Do you have your stats?

Chinese Game Server Administrator Arrested for DDoS Attack

Augusto Alvarez — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:43:19 +0000

Well I guess bad guys sometimes just get caught. That was the case for this Chinese guy that trying to attack a rival using a Denial-of-Service attack generated an Internet collapse in most of China (People = 1.300 millions, that’s right 1.3 billion people). The attack occurred last May,and the responsible of this attack: 23 year-old that owned private gaming servers and since he wasn’t doing so good in business decided attack his rivals, ending up taking down primary DNS servers in China.

To make a quick review about the story: A Chinese guy (with the surname of Bing) from a cotton factory offered online gaming with some private servers that he bought. So far, nothing out of the ordinary, there are thousands of these types of unlicensed gaming servers. And of course, this underground business usually involves some underground behaviors; Bing’s servers were being attacked by other gaming servers rivals, causing him to lose money. So he decided to strike back their rivals with some DDoS attacks.

Bing spent nearly u$s41.000 on these attacks, renting 81 servers only for this task, but they were ineffective. So they decided to ask for more help, that’s when the attacks collapsed DNSPod that not only served for Bing’s rivals servers, also serves several Internet companies in China.

Although police rarely have the jurisdiction or training needed to pursue such a case, officials confirmed the detention of four individuals, including Bing. Here’s the official report.

These attacks are not uncommon in these days, as we’ve said in this previous post. It is a good thing that authorities are tracking down these criminals.

Top 5 of the Most Anticipated PS3 Games

Augusto Alvarez — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 21:23:56 +0000

For a few months, I’ve been feeling that all the current PS3 games didn’t get me all that excited to actually go out there and buy them as soon as they are released. Metal Gear 4, GTA IV, FIFA 09 and just a couple more are my favorites and, in different ways, I think they represent just the edge that Play Station has over other similar consoles.

This list represents, in my perception, which are the games that are the most expected yet to come for Play Station 3:

Number 5 – FIFA 10

FIFA 09 made an incredible revolution among sports games in PS3, functionality, features, online gaming, realism were the main aspects that made FIFA 09 the best soccer game released for PS3 (and I think the best in any console).

Among the new features that will be included are: Virtual Pro (use your player with your own photo and see how the games adapts the photo with new face recognition software); new online types of games; several improvements in game play (new type of tactics can be implemented, defensive urgency, more physical play, 360 dribbles, etc etc).

Release Date: October 20, 2009.

Number 4 – Assassin’s Creed 2

It just stays in N° 4 because the first game released in 2007 was not actually all that I expected. It was not bad, don’t get me wrong, I just didn’t enjoy the missions in this games: all the same. Ubisoft seems that received most of the feedback and adds more excitement in this 2nd part.

The main story will be placed in Venice in the XV century and seems that will contain over 16 type of different missions. New weapons and movements, you will be able to swim and throw people to the water, new places to hide, etc etc.

Release Date: November 17, 2009.

Number 3 – Batman Arkham Asylum

This story starts with Batman that just has captured The Joker, and takes him to Arkham Asylum to acts as his prison. But of course, things go bad and The Joker gets loose and frees other members of the asylum.

To capture him back, Batman will use tons of gadgets and also the “detective mode” to get rid of all the bad guys. You will find awesome battle scenes with great video and motion, including “take down” options to use with your enemies, you will also get improvements in your weapons by gaining experience points.

Release Date: August 25, 2009.

Number 2 – Castlevania The Lord of the Shadows

The Castlevania saga makes an extraordinary comeback with the Lord of the Shadows. Great artistic pictures and looks like a more incredible game play. Here’s the trailer, enjoy:

(Yes, the game narrator is Patrick Stewart, X-Men’s Xavier)

Release Date: TBA 2010

Number 1 – God of War III

Soon as I completed God of War II and watching the game box with the message “God of War III for Play Station 3 – Coming Soon” I knew that the PS3 will be mine and all of my expectations will be on this game.

As for PS2, God of War will be a must for all PS3 gamers. The new features will include: bigger areas and scenarios, more brutal combats, intricate puzzles to solve, new weapons, using a new lighting technology inside the game play (simulates a human retina behavior with brightness and darkness), PS3 exclusive game.

Here’s the trailer:

Release Date: March 2010.

Well that is it for my list.

What is yours?

The Future of Home Entertainment and Films

Dean Sherwin — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 18:04:59 +0000

Netflix is a great service. I think that the days of strolling to the DVD store to pick out a few of your favourites are ending rapidly. Why should you pay full price for a DVD when you could stream loads every month for the same price? The same kind of service is taking place with our games consoles. Less than two weeks ago Games On Demand was released for the XBOX 360.

This allows you to download games paying a reduced price for them. I downloaded Battlefield 1943 and Assassin’s Creed – it’s just like having the game on a disc without the trip to the store. It saves the distributors money, it saves the producers money and more importantly it saves you money. But this rapid change in the way we get our movies will have big repercussions.

Firstly, there will be job losses. All those staff at the DVD store will be given their notice. What’s the point in keeping on staff when there isn’t enough business to pay them? The only solution for the big entertainment stores is to head online and try to create a Games on Demand or Netflix alternative.

Secondly, the whole hobby of collecting special edition DVDs and first editions will die. Because we can simply press ‘Download’, movies are starting to loose their individuality and allure that they’ve had for generations. The only thing, I believe, that will stop cult films and massive hits from loosing their spark will be the cinema.

Thirdly, you can say good bye to physical media. Games consoles are now being sold with hundreds of GM of memory. Soon, all media players (the equivalent of today’s BlueRay players) will just be giant memory card sitting underneath your TV.

But it may not all be bad news for the businesses, collectors and DVD player makers out there. When VCRs came out everyone assumed that the cinema would be finished in ten years. Yet here we are. I also think this will be good for piracy. Yes there will be more films online but once they are protected properly, sharing should diminish. After all, the main reason why people watch illegal copies of films online is because they don’t want the trouble of buying a DVD. If they offer videos of a very high quality at a small price, video viewing that’s all above board will come back.

The future looks bright for home entertainment indeed.

Web 3.0 will be Apps 1.5

Dean Sherwin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:52:53 +0000

The future is undoubtedly in Apps. Think about it. Over the last year thousands upon thousands of apps have been released and they are rapidly starting to replace websites views. Twitter, Facebook, iTunes and every large newspaper in the world have apps for mobile devices so people can use their services – otherwise they go elsewhere. Even those that may not are linked in with apps. Many websites have news feeds to apps such as Snaptu.

Soon, I predict that anyone wanting to book a flight, buy online or just surf the net will use apps instead. They offer all of the usefulness of the internet with all the easy design and eye pleasing qualities of software.

They’re also easier to use than internet browsers. If you want to read the news you simply click one little button instead of navigating to the page and then trying to find the kind of stories you want.

Apps are taking over a lot of my internet usage. If I want to check the weather, read movie reviews, tweet, use Facebook or search for pictures I use Snaptu. If I want to combine all my instant messaging into one I use eBuddy. It’s all streamlined, easier and quicker than using clunky browsers, not to mention they can fit in your pocket.

Without a shadow of a doubt, Web 3.0 will be App 1.5.

Twitter is for Old People

Augusto Alvarez — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 18:35:13 +0000

Only around 15% of all the Twitter users are less than 25 years old, who would know? An official report from Morgan Stanley says that teenagers just don’t use Twitter.

You won’t be surprised if I tell you that people under 25 years are the main Internet users, only this group of people takes the 25% of all population; but they also just represent 16% of all Twitter.

And which age group takes the majority on Twitter? 25-54 years old, they take up to 64% of the Twitter population (me included of course). 20% for people over 55 years and 16% for those under 25. Yeap, you read it right, 20% of Twitter users are over 55 years.

If you start thinking about it (and when I say “thinking” I mean checking your list of followers and following) you would probably notice that you have a bunch of friends, a selected group of celebrities (yes, I know, we all have @aplusk), and would probably see a large number of marketers, companies, brands, channels, journalists or even PR guys. And that’s not exactly the main focus of teens these days.

It doesn’t feel like the teen wave didn’t appear just yet in Twitter? Can we expect a new teen market for Twitter as it was for Facebook?

Crenk Recession Watch

Dean — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 11:31:20 +0000

Undoubtedly, the recession wasn’t really hitting the internet as hard as what it was other industries. Sure we has a bit of trouble over at Microsoft but that’s because they are also a trading company in the real world. What I mean to say is that the online world was fighting off the worst of it.

In fact, companies such as eBay and Amazon actually didn’t do so bad. People began to sell their stuff when they needed the cash and others bought them because they didn’t have too much cash to splash. It was all making perfect sense until the internet could take no more as real companies started to turn their back on it.

Advertising is plummeting. A new report states that advertising on a worldwide scale is down by five percent. In America, the figure is even bigger at 7% worth an estimated 0.4 Billion dollars. Companies who usually do quite well from advertising such as Monster reported that they lost 31% compared to last year.

Wouldn’t you know it; internet giant Google is the only ad publisher to report a growth, however even this is in single digits.

Now that advertising is failing the next sector to be hit will be entertainment. Big companies that have real world trading have more of a chance of survival but for online magazines and games where they often depend on advertising alone to keep the ship afloat – there may be trouble ahead indeed.

The IDC, who released the report did have some good news however.

“We think the industry will continue to see losses in the third and fourth quarters, but the growth rates–or the loss rates, if you will–will eventually begin to improve,” Karsten Weide, program director for digital media and entertainment at IDC, said in a statement. “However, we also believe the industry may have to wait until mid-2010 until it sees real growth again.”