I’ve realized that many of my posts to date have assumed a basic premise: that online digital media and advertising is exploding in growth, creating a fundamental shift in generating enormous value that will be captured by entrepreneurial endeavors. To provide a little bit of context into the first part of that claim, I want to point to two articles published this week.

ClickZ reported that online ad revenues were up 33% last year to $9.6 billion dollars. Both the absolute size and relative growth of that figure are tremendous. But like most facts and figures, it is difficult to really wrap your head around it. (I will try to spend some time and see if I can provide some comparable $10B industries).

One way to grasp the enormity of what’s going on was identified by Advertising Age in an Economist article,

“This year the combined advertising revenues of Google and Yahoo! will rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of America’s three big television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC.”

Think about that. Really think about it.

Google and Yahoo larger than network prime-time.

(And it’s not getting any better for the networks, as this graph identified by Chris Anderson of Wired shows)

We truly are in an industry with enormous potential for the foreseeable future, as I believe that the drivers of these trends are going to continue.