Archive for the ‘General’ Category

According to an article in the Australian marketing magazine AdNews , the Australian online display advertising market is changing. ABN Amro estimate that NineMSN’s share of revenue has decreased from 32% in 2005 to 24% in 2007. However, the challengers such as Fairfax Digital and News Digital Media has seen their share of revenue to increase respectively from 14% to 17% and 8% to 13% over the same period of time.

Lee Stephen, CEO of Aegis Media attributes this loss to a slow move  toward more innovative ad units and a delayed start with social media networks., which resulted in NineMSN to miss out on ‘mass community’ such as MySpace and Facebook.

On the other hand, Fairfax Digital and News Digital Media have made a quicker move by providing premium ad units and capturing more revenues from agencies.

Last week, Google hosted its second Google Geek Night in Sydney, which was a great occasion to review some of their products and especially You Tube.

In Australia You Tube is:

• Over 3 milion unique monthly visitors.
• Number 1 Entertainment site on the Internet in Australia.
• Average user spends 35 minutes on site each month.

You Tube is used and monetized as a brand channel. You Tube is the one stop to build brands online. Helwett Packard has been one of the first company to use You Tube to promote their brand by customizing the You Tube homepage for a couple of weeks. The advertsing solution is appealing, but it is mostly targeted at big companies as the advertsing package start at AU$30,000/ day.

Another interesting thing about You Tube is its audience. There is a common misconception that You Tube’s audience is only comprised of teens and uni students. While 53% of the website audience is represented by visitors below 34 years old ( including 27% of 18 -34 years old), 47% of the visitors are 35 and older, including 27% between 35 -49 years old. In fact You Tube audience is actually really similar to the Australian online population.

According to September 2007 data from Hitwise, the Australia shopping and classified websites landscape is dominated by the auction website Ebay with an overall market share of 33.57% (including Ebay.com.au and Ebay.com).

The second biggest player is Amazon with only 2.06% of market share. Trading Post Online, the online platform of the classified newspaper Trading Post is in third place with 1.63% of the market.

IT hardware providers Dell and HP are capturing repsectively 1.07% and 0.92% of the market, while online ticket shopping websites (Ticketek and Ticketmaster) end- the Top 10 ranking.

According to the October 2007 data from Hitwise , the most popular website in Australia is (without much surprise) Google Australia with an estimated market share of 7.47%. The top 3 websites include NineMSN (the Australian MSN portal in partnership with Channel9) with 2.66% and MySpace with 2.17%.

The overall Google market share, including Gmail, Google Search products and You Tube, reaches around 10.5%. On the other hand Yahoo search, Yahoo7! (the Yahoo portal in partnership with Channel 7) and Yahoo Mail only reaches 2.12%, which is lower than the market share of MySpace.

While really popular in Australia, Facebook is outranked by Myspace with a market share difference of 1.06%.

It is also important to notice that the only non ‘fully online‘, commercial company in the Top 20 Australian websites is actually CBA Netbank (Rank 17), the online banking service from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The Australian Bureau of Meterology is ending the ranking with a market share of 0.47%.

Source: Hitwise Data, Oct 2007

Even if many experts have predicted the death of online display advertising, it seems like it did not happen in 2007. According the the Internet Advertising Bureau, the online display market in Australia has generated over a $1 billion dollars in revenues in 2007 compared to $620 million in 2006.

Australian businesses seems to have picked up online advertising more than their Australasian counterparts as they are allocating around 14% of their total advertising budget to online activities (including Classifieds, Search and Display)

Recently Nielsen Online AdRelevance, has released their latest research on display advertising in Australia and has identified the most popular websites for display advertising. The rankings below are based on the share of total ad impressions from November 2006 until October 2007 in Australia.

1. RealEstate.com.au -> 22.93%
2. Smh.com.au (Sydney Morning Herald) -> 7.70%
3. NineMSN - Hotmail -> 6.32%
4. TheAge.com.au -> 4.10%
5. News.com.au -> 3.72%
6. BigPond.com -> 3.68%
7. WhitePages.com.au-> 3.5%
8. Yahoo!& Mail ->3.34%
9. Domain.com.au -> 3.25%
10. Whereis.com ->2.98%

RealEstate.com.au has a strong dominance of the market with over 22% of the total ad impressions. Newspapers online (smh, theage) are gathering a good share of the market in the same way as email addresses providers (Hotmail, Yahoo and BigPond).

Best practice online marketing requires a good knowledge of your target audience so that you can develop a tailored online strategy. If you are planning an online marketing campaign in Australia, the following information will help you to find out who is the typical Australian internet user.

According to the latest census from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 58% of the Australian population has access to internet. 20% of the Australian population still rely on dial up connection, while 37% has broadband access.

• More Girls

Based on Hitwise Data for the last 12 weeks, it appears that the typical Australian internet user is more likely to be a girl, as 52.02% are female, whereas 47.98% are male.

• Over 35

Looking at the demographics, a large proportion of the Australian internet population is over 35 years old (66.3%), with a high proportion of users over 55 (26.28%). The 18-24 years old slice represents only 13.77%.

• From the East Coast

More than 81% of the Australian Internet population lives on the East Coast (NSW, VIC, ACT, TAS, QLD) with around 34% for New South Wales. South Australia and Northern Territory only account for 8%, while Western Australia represents 11%.