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Search advertising growth: Apex or launching point?
Given online advertising’s meteoric growth between 2004 and 2007, and considering the marked deceleration of this growth over the past year, one might conclude that, as an industry, online advertising has achieved its inevitable zenith. 
 

No form of advertising is immune to an economic downturn, and U.S. online advertising growth—while still tracking on a positive curve and faring far better than traditional print and broadcast advertising—is projected to slow into single-digit growth for the first time in 2009.

Paid search advertising, the stalwart segment of the online economy, is projected to experience only 14.9% growth in 2009 compared to 21.4% growth in 2008.
        
 
So where does online advertising go from here? More specifically, what can we expect from the best performing venue in the online advertising world—paid search?

This is the billion-dollar question discussed today ad nauseam by an army of industry pundits and prognosticators, most of whom tend toward the safe, ostensibly obvious and clear answer—Paid search advertising will remain quite strong over the next decade but will shed its stratospheric growth and settle into a more sustainable, real-world, well-performing but relatively modest growth pace.

This answer, while safe and seemingly prudent, completely misses the mark. It fails to account for the inherent disruptiveness of search advertising; the evolving dynamics of Internet use; the speed and power of Web 2.0 innovation; and the current weighty economic pressure on marketers and those who serve them to wrest ever-greater value from a shrinking advertising dollar.
A more thorough and rigorous assessment of search advertising’s future growth gives credence to how these very powerful forces are working to radically alter the search advertising landscape and, in the process, re-ignite search advertising’s supersonic growth.