Back in November, I suggested that online ad sales might fall 40% in 2009 as a deep recession carved into online ad budgets. Looks like the market is headed that… or worse, at least according to this Ad Age article:

Cost-per-thousand ad impressions for online publishers are generally off about 20%, according to several people on both the buying and selling side, and sell-through rates are dropping. And where publishers used to unload 60% of their inventory, some are now able to sell only 30%.

But perhaps indicating more trouble ahead is just how cheap the low end of the market has gotten. An August study from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Bain & Co.* found the average CPMs on ad networks ranged from 60 cents to $1.10, only 6% to 11% of the prices publishers could command when they sold inventory directly. And the pricing for networks appears to be getting worse not better. CPMs for ad-network-sold ads are dropping, some by 50% year-over-year, according to a recent study of pricing by Pubmatic, which tracks pricing among many Long Tail ad networks.

Put those percentages together and you’ll discover that some publishers have seen revenues collapse 60% or more.

Compounding the recession-driven collapse in revenues is the fact that the volume of online content is still doubling yearly, thanks to all the blog posts, comments, photos, videos, ratings, interactions and e-phemera that we all create singly and socially.

With supply doubling and demand stagnant or down, advertising prices are headed to zero for any property that doesn’t deliver VERY compelling value to advertisers.

What a lot of publishers don’t get is that “selling” is only a tiny portion of the formula for survival in the short run, and success longer term. The real keys are innovating, keeping overheads low, improving processes and talking relentlessly to your customers about what they want.

A friend’s 81-year-old father told me this weekend, “when the New York Times goes, I go.”

He was still kicking hard, but the same can’t be said for the Times this morning. Liquidity crunch?

The Hungarian forint is sliding fast, currently at 233, down from ~200 a month ago. 300 forints to the dollar seems like the right level.

Lucy Kellaway in the FT:

The day after I read about the begging woman I was sent something even more upsetting. A banker at Commerzbank e-mailed me to say that he and 499 other senior colleagues had just been summoned to the bank’s headquarters and told to write their ideas on A4 pieces of paper and stick them on the plastic branches of a tree.

In good times I used to delight in stories like these. Aren’t people silly, I used to think with a complacent air of superiority. But now my thinking is different: if banks’ response to the current crisis is to stick bits of paper on fake trees, then the only rational thing for the rest of us to do is to surrender ourselves to panic.

This is old news, but worth chronicling for the record.

Earlier this month, Politicker, a network of state political blogs funded by NY Observer owner Jared Kushner, amputated most of its sites, leaving on a rump focused on NY and NJ.

Someone near the scene told me that almost 40 people are out of work, a quarter of that in IT. More than $4 million down the rat hole. Any confirmation or other details out there?

Blogads.com’s first competitor is the first to give up.

Pajamas Media was our first blog advertising competitor, created in November 2005 by a bunch of conservative and libertarian bloggers we’d previously worked with.

PJ’s ringleaders looked at our success and said, “Gee, that looks really easy. Let’s get someone to give us $3 million and we’ll kick Blogads’ butt.” That’s almost an exact quote, though I can’t point to source documents. (Anyone?) They went out and recruited ~75 conservative and libertarian bloggers we worked with. (Not everyone who joined PJ thought we were stupid or PJ was brilliant — a few remained friends, but went to PJ for outrageous guarantees.)

A year later, PJ’s management went back to their investor, a conservative billionaire [name?], and got another $3 million. Or was it $5 million? And that’s what they’ve done each year since. Until now…

As Pajamas wrote its bloggers yesterday:

As the end of the first quarter approaches and we near the production phase of Pajamas TV, we will continue to build our emphasis in this area. As a result we have decided to wind down the Pajamas Media Blogger and advertising network effective March 31, 2009. The PJM portal and the XPressBlogs will continue as is.

PJ’s fairly negative (and still not updated) history is here. And sadly, still no mention this Dunkirk-scale retreat on the front page of PJ’s site.

We’ll likely start working with some of these folks again via the conservative hive.

Lots of fun lessons in here about relying on Google, registrars, customer service, Monday AM QBing, big companies replying in comments.

Wow, this is bad news. What puts NC on the bleeding edge? From the WSJ.

Europeans, with hundreds of years (and wars) more experience than North Americans in weathering the vagaries of financial uncertainty, have driven gold to new highs in sterling (£661.55) and euros (€701.55). (Rubles too, no doubt.) The FT reports.

The total amount of gold held by the world’s gold ETFs last week rose for the first time above the 40m ounce level. Together, such investment vehicles are now the largest holders of physical gold after the official reserves of the US, Germany, the International Monetary Fund, France and Italy.

“The aggressive appreciation in the ETF contracts … is the clearest signal to date this year that gold is one of the limited assets that investors want exposure to during these frantic times,” Ms Tully said.

John Reade, a precious metal strategist at UBS in London, added that the change in ETF gold holdings so far this month, at plus 2.5m ounces, was “impressive”, but he warned that the figure fell short of the 6m ounces achieved in mid-October, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

ETF Securities, which provides commodity-based exchange-traded funds, said it saw record inflows last week, with $500m invested in its products in just two days.

From AFP:

France will offer all 18-year-olds a free daily copy of the newspaper of their choice, President Nicolas Sarkozy said Friday, announcing a package of measures to help the beleaguered press.

In addition to the free paper scheme, Sarkozy announced plans to double the government’s budget for buying advertising in the press, a freeze on the cost of postal distribution and a reduction in payroll taxes for newsagents.