Just got back from coffee with Hollis Thomases who heads up the WebAdvantage.net agency. Her marketplace trend gut is better than anyone's I know. So I asked her when she thought the online advertising world would begin to see an upswing again. Everybody who thought it would be Sept has seen their hopes dashed as August closes with far lower than expected pre-bookings.

Hollis said she thinks i-ads will do very well in late 4th quarter. Why? Because marketers are holding back from all media buys right now, waiting for risk to pass. Then at the end of this year they'll need to do something fast to get their sales up and spend whatever's left in their fiscal budget. And Internet marketing is far more quick, cheap and easy than offline media tends to be. She could be right. Lots of online publishers I know saw a little unexpected flurry of similar activity last Dec.