Online Advertising Forecast for 2010

Piper Jaffray estimates that the total online advertising market will reach $55 billion in 2010. That\’s a 27% CAGR from 2005 levels.

SG Cowen says companies will spend $17.3 billion in paid search and $12.4 billion in other forms of online advertising.

So this is a huge growth industry.

A professor of entrepreneurship once told me that while most start-up companies go out of business in the first five years, he claimed that 80% of businesses started in an industry whose growth rate exceeded 10% annually would be in business after five years.

The Cost of Research

I am spending a good deal of time trying to determine where mobile technology is going. Several of my companies are going to be involved in delivering content or services to mobile devices including cell phones.

So it is a bit frustrating to keep finding research analyst reports that are priced in the $2-5,000 range. Here\’s a 53 page report on the future of mobile phones selling for $3,495.

A Billion Audio Players in 2009!

Sometimes you see market forecasts that blow your mind. I remember
attending Jupiter conferences starting in 1995 where forecasts were
made showing hundreds of millions of internet users worldwide in the
coming years, and it was mind-boggling then. Now, estimates say we\’re
over a billion internet users worldwide.

Any time I see a billion of anything, I\’m pretty impressed. So I was

Inspiration from the Founder of JetBlue

Today I had lunch with my cousin, an attorney from Salt Lake City. He told me about taking a JetBlue flight from New York last year and having the good fortune of being on the same plane with JetBlue Founder David Neeleman. Neeleman served the customers, as is his custom, and then sat next to my cousin and chatted for some time.

5 Most Valuable Services Most Entrepreneurs Can\’t Afford

I was very fortunate to be involved from the beginning of Ancestry.com: an internet startup that achieved positive cash flow (by July 1998) before raising outside capital. This required some self-funding, bootstrapping, and using all the online marketing tactics that we could discover. It also helped that we sold annual subscriptions to our online databases. We would collect the money up front, but recognize the revenue over a full twelve months. So we achieved positive cash flow well before we reached profitability.