Michael Learmonth:

So much for the theory that online ad networks are immune to an economic slowdown: PubMatic, a company that helps online publishers sift through ad network offerings to find the highest-priced ad, said average ad network prices were down 23% from March to April…

Big sites fared worse than small ones. Ad rates for big sites (more than 100 million page views a month) dropped 52% to $0.18 in April from $0.38 in March (do I hear free?). Medium sites (1 million to 100 million page views a month) were nearly flat with rates dropping a cent to $0.33 from $0.34, while small sites actually improved to $1.29 in April from $1.18 in March.

Is this a wholesale slowdown in the making, or long-tail economics coming into play? Maybe “free” does make sense in some circumstances - and maybe larger sites (or those wanting to move into the “large” category) should start thinking about new business models.

Disclosure: This weblog participates in the Forbes program, a network of small sites, and I do it just for fun.

I was fishing, thereby missing the action….NOT

The New York Times has spoiled the fun.

Fake Steve agrees, noting “people around the world have been robbed of their sense of childlike wonder.”

Mainstream media now rushes in to sponsor FSJ.

Pamela Jones says Dan Lyons is a hypocrite, just in case you “want to sue.”

I can only suspect FSJ will be short on comments from here on out.

Oxford Analytica has a brief on identify theft published over at Forbes.com. The reason I say “hit the big time” is because OA is quoting some monsterous incident numbers in Hooked On Phishing. Accordingly, they say that the FTC reported roughly 27.3 million cases of identify theft over the last five years - nearly one-tenth of the US population. The total cost of the problem in the U.S. last year was $52.6 billion.

Some parts of this story strike me as odd. The first is the sheer magnitude of the cases. I suspect there are some other numbers in there, like possibly credit card fraud via traditional theft. The second issue is why throw “phishing” in the headline? Many of the cases quoted, like the Lexis-Nexis and Choicepoint issues, were not really phishing cases, but instead either a lack of internal security, or just plain stupidity. And the article mentions other forms of fraud as well.

I think those numbers deserve a little more scrutiny. This article is more so one on identity theft and consumer financial fraud, and the writers need to think a little harder about their words before they create a panic and everyone turns off their computers out of fear. Although phishing is an issue, it is part of a much bigger problem which will require additional regulatory and financial infrastructure changes far beyond protecting personal computer communications before it is solved.

***UPDATE***

The FTC’s latest congressional testimony stated that there were roughly 10 million victims of “some form of ID theft” in 2003. A quick peak of the FTC’s ID theft resource center (which is paltry, to say the least), denotes incidents of ID theft as any time “someone uses your personal information such as your name, Social Security number, credit card number or other identifying information, without your permission to commit fraud or other crimes.” I can agree that the use of a name or Social Security number should likely fall into the heinous category, but the use of someone’s credit card number is nothing more than financial fraud, that is unless they parlay that number into acquiring additional credit or other financial resources in the person’s name.

This reinforces what what Bruce Schneier said a few weeks back. The FTC cannot properly report the real story, so I suspect the financial world is going to have serious problems targeted and fixing the real problem. Maybe the FTC should start listening to Schneier as well.