economy

Google releases their Q2 earnings today.  It will be interesting to see how their results will be received on Wall St. for a number of reasons. Google is one of those companies that people measure the economy as a whole against to some extent. As such, today has sort of a groundhog day kind of feel to me.  I don’t typically spend a lot of time watching economic news - even in good times, but i’ll be paying a little more attention to it today.

More than half (69%) of adult Americans have gone online to get help with personal economic issues and to gather information about national economic problems, according to a new report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Some 52 percent of Americans have had to cope with a major economic loss during the recession including 35 percent who have seen their investments lose more than half their value.

More than half (55%) of IT professionals say the economy has changed the role of IT and 51 percent say that budget limitations are the biggest barrier to their innovation, according to a new study released by Microsoft and conducted by Harris Interactive.

Online advertising contributes $300 billion to the U.S. economy, according to a new study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The ad supported Internet accounts for 2.1 percent of the total U.S. gross domestic product. It directly employs more than 1.2 million Americans with above-average wages in jobs that did not exist two decades ago, and another 1.9 million people work to support those with Internet-related jobs.

The nightly news paints a dreary picture. Whether it’s due to a freeze in the credit markets, rising unemployment rates, or just plain nerves, consumers are keeping their wallets closer than ever. At the same time, marketing and advertising budgets are being slashed and executives are demanding measurable, meaningful media from their campaigns. Each marketing dollar must go further. Sales are more valuable than ever. So, what are marketing managers to do to meet such demands?

Mobile advertising marketplace AdMob has released its Mobile Metrics Report looking at statistics for the month of February. It highlights some interesting trends in Smartphone Market Share. Even in the current economic climate, smartphones managed to continue to gain significant market share on a global scale over the past six months. This market share rose from 26% to 33% in February.

Searches for a number of terms related to the economic downturn have shown significant gains in the past year, according to comScore. The most notable increases were searches relating to the declining job market, including searches using the term "unemployment" (up 206 percent to 8.2 million searches) and "unemployment benefits" (up 247 percent to 748,000 searches).

The usage of online gaming sites has grown 27 percent during the past year to 86 million visitors in December 2008, while the total time spent playing online games increased 42 percent, according to comScore.American's total amount of Internet time spent playing online games grew from 3.7 percent in December to 4.9 percent in December 2008.