SearchBiz: MSN Staff Shuffles; GOOG Gains; eMarketer On 2009 Ad Spending

AllThingsD and paidContent.org are both reporting on staffing changes at MSN. AllThingsD calls it a case of “musical chairs,” and that seems pretty accurate based on a memo sent out by Greg Nelson of the Global Media Group. Nelson himself is now under Satya Nadella, Senior VP of Search, and Erik Jorgensen, Corporate VP of MSN. Yusuf Mehdi and Brian McAndrews are now Senior VPs of Online Audience Business and Advertisers & Publishers, respectively. Those are just a couple of the changes at MSN; it’s a holiday week, so there will be no quiz on all the changes in the morning.

GOOG gained almost 10% today on a couple pieces of good news. According to TheStreet.com, both comScore and Nielsen Online say Google widened its search market share in October. ComScore gives Google 63.1% of the U.S. search market, up almost 5% over October 2007 and way ahead of Yahoo’s 20.5%. Nielsen Online has Google at 61.2% in October, and Yahoo a distant second with 16.9% market share.

The other factor? An analyst likes Google this week. (What else would it be?) According to Bloomberg, a Barclays analyst says there are “early signs” that ad spending has risen in the past couple weeks. Desperate for any piece of good news, even if it’s just “early signs,” the market jumped all over the Barclays report and pushed GOOG up.

And speaking of ad spending, eMarketer has taken those IAB numbers we wrote about last week, and updated its projections for 2009. eMarketer now pegs online ad spending at $25.7 billion in 2009, an 8.9% increase over 2008. Earlier this year, eMarketer had predicted ad spending would rise 14.5% in 2009. eMarketer expects online video advertising to lead all other formats in 2009, with an estimated jump of 44.9% spending next year.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Matt McGee

Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.