Monday, October 01, 2012


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Research Shows Ad-Supported Web Businesses a Major Source of Job Creation
U.S. housing  firming up

By now it’s hard to find a lot of B2B marketers who are still skeptical about the power of web-based advertising and marketing. But, whether you’re all in or still sticking your toes in the water, it’s clear this business is growing robustly and will be here for a while.

Consider this. New data from Harvard Business School claims that employment in the ad-supported Web ecosystem doubled over the past four years to 5.1 million. What’s more, those jobs contributed $530 billion to the U.S. economy last year -- close to double the 2007 figures. The HBS research, commissioned by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, found that, “Jobs grew fastest in digital advertising agencies, ad networks, ad exchanges, customer analytics firms and listening platforms,” report authors said. “The engine of growth was not just consumer-facing companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but also firms that used the data spun off by them.”

OUR TAKE: What encouraged us the most was the fact that overall job creation was highly dispersed. Instead of being dominated by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, the majority of new jobs were being offered at smaller entrepreneurial ventures across every state and county. Sole proprietors and small firms were cited as the big winners, this year. They contributed 375,000 full-time equivalent jobs to the 2 million in the Internet ecosystem. App development alone accounted for 35,000 full-time equivalent jobs, and the number of moonlighters was an order of magnitude larger.
Click here to download the study

Macro view

According to the Case Schiller index, single family home prices went up for the third straight month in July in all 20 major cities measured. Meanwhile, consumer confidence rose to the highest level in seven month, the Conference Board said
last week. Economists say consumer confidence accounts for as much as two-thirds of economic activity in the U.S., which analysts suggest is a sign that consumers and businesses are finally readers to spend more aggressively.

Meanwhile, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday that new home sales in August were up
a whopping 27.7 percent from the pace a year ago. The median price of a new home jumped 11.2 percent in August to $256,900, the biggest one-month gain on record. The median sales price was up 17 percent compared with August 2011. According to housing experts the $256,900 median price in August was the highest sales price since new homes sold for $262,600 in March 2007, a period when prices were coming down from the peaks reached during the housing boom.

Conclusion

Fiscal cliff worries aside. Regardless of how you think next month’s election will turn out, the economy is slowly but surely on the upswing even if we it takes years more to get back to the level of PERCEIVED prosperity in the middle of the last decade. As the HBS research shows, it’s a new world out there and we’re likely never going back to a media environment or business climate that we had before. Move fast. Move smart. Do your best to stay on top of every new tool you can for doing your job better. They’re not all going to work, but you’ll forever rue the day that you didn’t make the effort to explore the one killer app that could have revolutionized your business—and instead revolutionized the competition’s.

TAGS: Harvard Business School. Web advertising ecosystem. Case Schiller index. Home prices. Job growth, Interactive Advertising Bureau

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