This chart is from a deck put together by Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist
The thing that jumps out at you is the long and structural decline in newspaper ad revenue as a share of the total market. And that's why Hal put this slide in his deck.
But the thing that jumps out at me is the line called Internet. I don't know what that includes. It could just be display. It could be all Internet. I don't have time this morning to do the legwork to figure that out.
But what this chart says is that over that past decade Internet has gone from nothing to 5% of all the ad spend in the US.
That is the most bullish signal about investing in the Internet that I have seen this year. If you include audio over the Internet (what radio becomes) and video over the Internet (what TV and cable become) in the Internet line, then I bet Internet will someday be over two-thirds of the ad spend.
Time to get get out our checkbook and start making some more bets.
