Crenk

It has already been reported by the BBC and the New York Times that Google should become the largest advertising seller in the UK by the end of the year.

Google earned $803 million, about £407 million, in the United Kingdom in the first quarter. If you assume that rate won’t grow, that makes £1.6 billion for the year. And since Google’s British earnings are up 40 percent from a year ago, it is a safe bet it will grow.

That means Google will overtake the ITV television network as the biggest seller of advertising in Britain this year, Mr. Cellan-Jones figures. ITV sold about £1.5 billion of advertising last year.

This year Morgan Stanley estimates Google’s total advertising revenue will be $21.9 billion. Excluding the payments it makes to companies that display its ads, Google’s total ad revenue will be $15.7 billion. Time Warner, the largest media company in the world, earned $8.8 billion in advertising revenue last year. Viacom had $4.7 billion in ad revenue last year.

I have been thinking the same thoughts for a while now, that is I think the next place to boom in terms of the internet is display advertising and whoever can actually get that right, will be challenging the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in the next 3-5 years.

The BBC has long been toying with the idea of blogs. Today SixApart have announced as a nice piece of PR that they are running the blogs for the BBC on their software. The blogs themselves are for individual shows and for individual people. Each blog has its own distinct style and design. As a collective the design really lacks imagination and format. If you would like to know where you can find this lack of imagination please head to the blog network home page.

The BBC has launched their web 2.0 version of there home page and personally I think it is a great improvement on what they had before.  The new BBC home page allows each user to create there own personalised home page, thus making it quite similar in a way to Netvibes and what they are trying to achieve. This is a great step forward for the BBC who have always been seen as a little behind the times, and especially considering how bad I think their iPlayer is! However, this being said, make sure you head over to the new BBC website and let me know what you think!

The BBC’s Dragons Den show has long been a place for entrepreneurs to come and pitch their ideas to budding investors. I have always hated shows like this, the investors are just so greedy with percentages and most of the time i think it is all just a set up. However on tonight’s Dragons Den a few people i know from the music industry down here in Cornwall are pitching their idea for funding of a music festival. I know for a fact that music festivals in Cornwall, UK, just don’t work. Very few make money and the majority lose big money.

I have heard from a few friends that the idea for the music festival gets funding from one of the Dragons on the show, but the they turn it down for a better offer elsewhere.

The moral to the story is that a good pitch on a show like this really doesn’t mean the business is going to work. The people that ran the music festival and got the funding ended up losing approx £80,000. So the Dragons must thank their lucky starts they didnt get involved!