No crisis on the web? How are you doing?
According to the Union of Belgian Advertisers and researchers Profact [as published on Digimedia (dutch)], there is no crisis on the Internet. According to this report, 90% of all advertisers said the crisis does impact the way they work and over 80% reduced their budgets by 10 to 20%.
Where it gets interesting, is where they are spending their money. 55% of all advertisers said they will spend less money on tv, newspaper, magazine, movie theater, radio and street ads. However, 37% of them said they are investing more in Internet advertising.
On top of that, I also see a lot of interactive agencies looking to hire extra Flash designers and developers. This week alone, I saw at least 6 job openings across Europe on Twitter. I also received a couple of emails from agencies looking for people.
While talking to agencies at both FITC and FlashCamp UK last week, I found that this seems to be a common trend. Most of the people I talked to still had plenty of work but are expecting a cutback in marketing projects. Most of the people I talked to are planing on filling any gaps with research (looking into mobile development came up frequently) and diversifying their skill set.
Now, I may be completely wrong, but to me it sounds as if “the Internet” is doing ok at the moment. I’m sure there have been some cutbacks here and there already but the bigger agencies seem to be doing alright.
I’d love to hear your stories! How have you been doing? Has your company been hit by the crisis? If so, in what way?
3 Comments
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- Gilles Guillemin - RT @sjespers: Blogged: No crisis on the web? How have you been doing? http://is.gd/m4o8
- Milan Orszagh - RT @sjespers: Blogged: No crisis on the web? How have you been doing? http://is.gd/m4o8
- Erik van de Wiel - Reading: "No crisis on the web? How are you doing? | Serge Jespers" ( http://tinyurl.com/dn3mmf )
- Swizec - RT @aapjerockdt Reading: "No crisis on the web? How are you doing? | Serge Jespers" ( http://tinyurl.com/dn3mmf )
- Flash Adventure - I have the same feeling, Internet is OK http://www.webkitchen.be/2009/03/06/no-crisis-on-the-web-how-are-you-doing/ for now
- laurent untereiner - No crisis on the web? How are you doing? http://is.gd/m4o8 (god hear that!)
- Pavel Gritsai - Hmm... how is your internet business doing? http://www.webkitchen.be/2009/03/06/no-crisis-on-the-web-how-are-you-doing/
- localToGlobal » Blog Archive » news review -> 10th week of 2009 - [...] > No crisis on the web? How are you doing? | Serge Jespers [...]
- joseeight - internet jobs seem to be safe according to @sjespers: http://is.gd/m4o8 (i agree)
- pault107 - No crisis on the web? How are you doing? http://snurl.com/de2y7
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Hi Serge,
I’m working as a Flex Consultant for US-UK software company which has based its development centre in my hometown, Cracow. We build mainly B2B applications, mainly tools for business consultants and management layer. Actually I can admit we expect at least 3-4 big projects coming in next 6 months and we will need to hire at least two more RIA developers while having already 4 of them.
As consultant I travel quite a lot to our clients and so called “economic crisis” is of course main topic after meetings. I can say, people are quite more careful with their spendings at the moment. However, I’ve noticed that they blame usually lack of functionality of their current IT solutions they have now and therefore – think about new ones – and giving us jobs.
Best regards,
Wojciech Ptak
Many offline businesses are currently suffering from the crisis, however – you’re right, I can hardly name any online e-companies who is doing bad now. Working on freelance basis I didn’t mention any changes in job offers.
Btw, more companies are coming out with new products. Spicynodes.org is one, which should have a great start just another day.
I’ve heard of a couple of large companies having probs but as you said on the main everything seems to be rolling on. It makes sense though right as the number of users on the internet is constantly growing and advertising on the web is soooo much cheaper than other mediums, both for creation and deployment.
That said I still think its very early days. Budgets will have been set last year and departments will be pushing to spend those budgets in full as they know they are likely to get cutbacks in April. If they don’t spend their budget, they likely to get huge cuts for the following financial year. I’d expect to for things to begin to drop off in the last quarter of 2009 if we haven’t seen any miraculous turnaround in the world economy.