Online Ad Revenues Pick Up In The Fourth Quarter.

Exactly. The post does not include a single year-over-year comparison. Because of seasonal variations, year-over-year is the only valid revenue comparison in most industries. Do the writers at TC not remember that little consumer tradition of holiday gift giving?

Either they chose to ignore YOY so they could use contrarian (optimistic) headlines to get attention or they are utterly clueless. In the first case, that's blatantly unethical reporting.

It doesn't look so bad to me. They're reporting on the rate of growth of the revenue; not just the revenue. If you want to look at it positively, the chart provided shows that online advertising revenues have not fallen for at least the last 5 quarters... not something you could say about a lot of markets.

While it's true that the increase between Q3'07 and Q4'07 is not as large as in '08, revenues are still going up.

If my January adsense income is any indication then I'm definitely with you on that one. It's the worst month to date since I've been using adsense (about 2 years).