recession - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Zavvi, formerly Virgin Megastores, has been forced to suspend web sales of DVDs, games and music products.

The entertainment retailer has been poleaxed by the fallout from Woolworths’ demise after the latter’s wholesale arm EUK stopped providing it with its key product lines.

The latest casualty of the economic slowdown appears to be pureplay internet retailer 247 Electrical, which has closed its online store.

The 247 Electrical website currently displays a “we are having some technical difficulties” message on its homepage (the only page that works), but a closer look at the title bar presents a more ominous statement: “STORE CLOSED”.

Venture capitalists are worried and urging their portfolio companies to enter survival mode. The layoffs have started. Michael Arrington has declared Web 2.0 dead.

While there are some who still cling to hope (and there are still some in outright denial), it's clear that most of the people involved with the world of internet startups have accepted the reality of the global economic "downturn" and understand that its impact on the industry will probably run deep and it will probably be prolonged.

It seems fair to say that we can now start using the term ‘recession’ openly, without being called pessimists. The question is: what are you going to do about it?

To find out, you only need to figure out whether you are going to be an ostrich, or an owl.

You’ve probably already guessed where I’m going with this one…

With the financial markets in serious turmoil and financial services firms hurting, it's not surprising that financial services firms are spending far less on online display advertising than they did when times were better.

A new report by Nielsen highlights just how substantial the decrease is and indicates that it's having a noticeable impact on the entire online display ad market.

Some argue that an economic downturn is the ideal time to start a new business and to be sure, history evidences the fact that highly-successful companies are often born in challenging business environments.

This is little surprise. After all, they push entrepreneurs to be more innovative, resourceful and frugal than they may otherwise have been.

As they say, "necessity is the mother of all invention."

Don’t mention the 'R word', I hear you all say. Well, I thought a post on “Recession Challenges” would be a fairly topical one, bearing in mind the recent ‘credit crunch’ stories we’ve seen taking up more and more column inches and airtime each month.

Since speaking at last year's Online Marketing Masterclass, cScape's Customer Engagement Director Richard Sedley has been rather busy writing a book: “Winners and Losers in a Troubled Economy: How to use online customer engagement to gain a competitive advantage."

Here, we ask him to explain his views on why the internet may be a safe(r) haven for marketers during recessionary times...