Online ad trend get worse for Yahoo!, newpapers

Filed under: Forecasts, Industry, Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), New York Times'A' (NYT)

New evidence shows that online advertisers are building their search engine marketing and moving away from big display ad investments. According to The Wall Street Journal, "Faced with a slowing economy, advertisers are sticking to what they view as the safest way to reach online customers directly: the plain text ads that appear on search-result pages."

To state the obvious, the news seems to be bad for Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), and AOL. These portals rely heavily on display ads for their revenue and have modest search income.

The data is much, much worse for newspapers. Companies like The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) are counting on online advertising to take the place of falling print revenue. A great deal of the advertising that runs at newspaper sites i