Advertising moves to online according to Gates

Thanks to Wordblog and Richard Sambrook for leading me to the piece in the Seattle Times where our good friend Bill Gates is predicting that within the next five years advertising will have migrated to the online platforms.

Speaking of the traditional platforms he said

I have a lot of friends in the newspaper industry and,
of course, this is a tough, wrenching change for them, because the number of
people who actually buy, subscribe to the newspaper and read it has started an
inexorable decline,"

The article does report however that not everyone is so pessimistic.

David Cohen,executive vice president at Universal McCann

I know that the newspaper
industry is definitely going through an evolution, but ... there's still a
tremendous amount of circulation in some of these markets,"