Chart of the Day - Online Ad Rates

Online display ad prices haven't fully recovered to last year's peak, but according to one source, they're getting there.
At the end of June, ad rates among the 6,000 Web publishers working with ad-optimizing firm PubMatic were up 35% since a low point at the beginning of the year. Rates climbed 15% between May and June.“Although ad pricing has not returned to year-ago levels, the industry has gone up consistently every month since January 2009.

Business Magazines Head For The Abyss

At the same time, the big business magazines are tanking along with the economy.  McGraw-Hill is trying to dump BusinessWeek while it still can. Earlier, Condé Nast pulled the plug on Portfolio. And Forbes has shed a large portion of its staff this year.

In Q2, magazine ad revenue dropped an average 22% year-over-year, according to the Magazine Publishers of America. The big business mags had it even worse: BusinessWeek was down 30%, Forbes down 35%, and Fortune down 43%. Even the Economist, which has outperformed its peers in recent years, was down 20%. (Subscription revenue and online revenue -- the lone source of growth for many publications -- is not included in these tallies.)