I ran across this little commentary on the future of spending for online advertising at GigaOM and thought that I’d share. From November 7:

This being the week of ad:tech, news of online advertising has dominated the conversation: from MySpace’s hyper- targeted ads to Facebook’s new ad system to broadband advertising systems introduced by companies such as AnchorFree. The advertising, of course, is becoming social, mobile, and behavioral.If you take all this into account, and juxtapose it against the recent eMarketer’s forecast — U.S. online advertising nearly doubling from $21.4 billion in 2007 to $42 billion in 2011, representing about 13 percent of the total ad-spend — what you get is a pretty decent context for the ongoing battle amongst Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO), phone & cable companies, wireless carriers, Facebook, MySpace (NWS) and countless other startups.

Of course, it also means that advertising (or marketing messages) are going to be in-your-face, every time you turn around. What is the theoretical limit to our ability to absorb these messages? I just wonder, when, as people-being-marketed-to will we say: Enough! Stop! Or will we?

I agree that if online advertising continues to be bought and utilized the way most advertisers currently do, then we’re looking at an exponentially saturated, nasty and crowded commercial internet. Hell, we’re seeing that “potential” today (check the pop-up warning at the top of the page…Thank you Firefox):

Of COURSE by 2011 spending on advertising and marketing online will be more; not because we’ll be slapping 20 banner ads on say the Google homepage, turning into a veritable internet version of a NASCAR race car; It’s because (hopefully) by that point we’ll have become smarter about how to use the medium. Production costs will rise as we figure out how to better utilize ARG’s , branded online video and games, and even simple online executions like banner ads (shutter). I guess I’m trying to say that I hope costs go up not because of quantity but because of quality. Thoughts?