Helping people stay in touch with friends online has become the latest battleground for media moguls.
The rise of Facebook, created by Harvard drop-out Mark Zuckerberg three years ago, is challenging the dominance of MySpace in the social networking market, which may go some way to explain why that site's owner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, has considered exchanging it for a 25% stake in online portal and search giant Yahoo!
But the allure of the internet advertising market for Mr Murdoch is not going to go away. PricewaterhouseCoopers will today publish its latest Global Entertainment and Media Market report. It shows that last year, online advertising worldwide grew 37.9% to $31.6bn, accounting for more than 7% of the total advertising market of $407bn. Globally the internet will remain the fastest growing advertising medium, with compound annual growth of 18.3% up to 2011. By that time the online advertising market will be worth $73bn, accounting for 14% of the global advertising market of $531bn. That's still a lot to play for.
Read more..
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2107627,00.html