Marine Industry Advertising on the Internet

by Rob Kothe on 27 Feb 2007 Boaters have moved on line, more than 700,000 sailors and powerboaters from around the world will visit Sail-World.com and Powerboat-world.com this year. An average of 70,000 boaters per month, and around half of them will be getting an average of two newsletters a week by the end of March 2007.

Smaller numbers in Australia of course, but the Sail-world dominates the Australian online boating news scene.

Its Australian Racing and Australian Cruising sites are rich in content and diversity and the newly launched Powerboat-World will follow the same themes with lots of news, large images and a rapidly growing video content.

Each of these sites will provide considerable value for marine industry advertisers, as readership shifts from 'marine magazines' to the internet. In 2007 you see start to see the first 10 second, 30 second, two minute and five minute commercials and video boat reviews on Sail-world and Powerboat-World.

We are regularly asked how traffic on various boating/sailing websites compare.

Here are some statistics taken today by Alexa, of sites visited by Australian's. This is of interest to Australian marine industry advertisers, eeking value in the local market, as it excludes overseas incoming traffic.

For Sail-World which is easily the largest boating news site in Australia, traffic to Sail-World NZ, Asia, USA, UK & Europe are excluded.

Google.com.au traffic rank in Australia 1
ABC.net.au traffic rank in Australia 27

Sail-World.com/Powerboat-World traffic rank in Australia 693

Yachting.org.au & all state Yachting association sites and some club sites combined 9,032
Sailinganarchy.com traffic rank in Australia 11,565
Afloat.com.au traffic rank in Australia 17,658
Clubmarine.com.au traffic rank in Australia 18,697
Boatingoz.com.au traffic rank in Australia 18,968
Sailing.org traffic rank in Australia 24,572
Bymnews.com traffic rank in Australia 27,761
Livesaildie.com traffic rank in Australia 87,343
more sites **

From these independent statistics, its clear that Sail-World and Powerboat-World are continuing to gain traffic at the expense of marine magazines and other on-line media.

If you know a Sailing Industry company that is NOT advertising with Sail-World, send them this article and suggest they call Liam Daly on 0405497423

Does the Internet really matter, well News Limited, Fairfax and the New York Times think so.

Last week there was a report from financial commentator Glen Dyer from the Financial/Political publication Crikey about Print media and Internet.... it’s full of numbers but they all point in one direction, advertisers are following audiences from Print to the Internet. Australia wide, the growth in Internet advertising could exceed 50% in 2007.

Here is the article from ‘Glenn Dyer

‘We saw it in yesterday's Fairfax Media result: a hint of the growth in revenue for online advertising.

It's outstripping all other forms of media and it saved Fairfax from a terrible result, just scraping through thanks to 43.7% growth in revenue for Fairfax Digital - to $61.2 million - and 41.7 per cent growth in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, to $17 million.

Internationally, the internet is on a commercial roll. Last week, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, the publisher of America’s most prestigious newspaper, The New York Times, said it was possible the paper might even cease paper publishing.
'I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either,' he told Tel Aviv-based daily Haaretz in a rare interview. 'The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we're leading there.'

Figures out yesterday for the Australian market show internet advertising reached $990 million in 2006 in a series of huge leaps: it totaled $195 million in the first quarter and by the third quarter had reached $263 million.

Now, according to Fusion Strategy, a Sydney consultancy, internet advertising will top the $1.5 billion mark in 2007, exceeding radio advertising and the magazine market.

If it reaches this level it will be valued at more than half the metropolitan TV market and around 45 per cent of the total Australian TV ad market (metro and regionals). In comparison pay TV is expected to reach $225 million this year from $205 million in 2006.

On Fusion's figures, if internet advertising doesn't slow down it could pass newspapers ($3.33 billion and all TV $3.34 billion) by around 2010.
Interestingly TV will surpass newspapers this year as the media with the largest TV spend.

But the internet is closing rapidly with this year's increase estimated by Fusion to more than 50 per cent.

* (Alexa.com, the metric's division of Amazon of sites, provides independent daily statistics on websites around the world.)

** There are another dozen sites of interest to Australian boaters where overall traffic is too small for reliable metrics or where boating content is less than 1% of the overall site traffic and for which independent metrics are unavailable.