If you were only paying attention to the front pages and lead stories of the major news media, you would think that 2004 was an explosive year for blogs, which will continue to grow in audience, and that is where the story ends. What has received less attention, except in business and media circles, is the projected growth of online advertising. BusinessWeek's outlook for 2005 reports a projected growth of 25% in online advertising because marketers will be looking to better target their advertising. As the pressure for better ROI pounds marketers and advertisers, online advertising is an attractive, cost-effective balance to the still necessary, but expensive, traditional print, radio and tv methods. Counting eyeballs isn't good enough anymore. Marketers are seeing the promised land in online advertising because of the measurement and accountability offered by online technologies. Rigorous, real-time analysis tools emphasize data capture and performance measures. Online advertising campaigns give marketers an unprecedented control and leave less doubt as to who is biting and how messages perform against each other. Recently, Dodgeball has received considerable press. It's a new opt-in service that lets you know when your friends are near you. I'm sure retail advertisers are salivating over being able to send text messages as advertisments based upon proximity to stores. Given the privacy issues, these services rely on opting in. However, what if you got a cell phone for free, but couldn't turn off the advertisments? Would it be worth it? Morgan Stanley reports that as an industry, online advertising is undermonetized. Advertising platforms such as Google and BlogAds will continue to refine their business models and services to become even more attractive to marketers and advertisers. Banner ads, pop ups, RSS ads, and 15 second online commercials aren't going anywhere, and we'll certainly see more ingenious ways to make users engage online ads. How about Podvertising for podcasts? And Vlogertising for vlogs? Ok...now I'm just having fun.