eMarketer is one of Amplify Interactive’s favorite online advertising resources. Recently they had an article stating some predictions for the upcoming year. If anyone can offer valid predictions for 2008, it’s the guys & gals at eMarketer.

A couple of points they brought up that seemed particularly interesting were:

• “A deal between Microsoft, Yahoo! or AOL (pick two of the three) will take place before the third quarter…” – I think this is an inevitable move as well. As Google’s share of the monthly search volume continues to increase month-after-month, their competitors need to do something a bit drastic to combat this. And, obviously, with MSN Live’s retooling and Yahoo!’s Search Assist component not working out very well for the respective search engines, a merger seems like a reasonable thing to predict for 2008.

• “Overall US online ad spending will be surprisingly resilient, even in the potentially recessionary economy. With money tight, marketing executives will continue to gravitate toward the Internet, looking for more measurable ad formats to buttress their positions.” – aside from the awesome word usage of “buttress”, this is a trend that looks like a sure bet in 2008.

• “Social networking will remain a key online activity regardless of the individual performance of MySpace or Facebook.” – as Ben highlighted in our 2007 wrap-up post, our services were expanded in 2007 to include social media marketing & optimization. We expanded our service set to include social media outlets because we saw just how influential and, ultimately, how much time individuals spent on social networking sites in 2007. eMarketer is predicting that social networking sites will continue to be hotbeds for online activity into 2008.