The Perl Journal January, 2005
It seems that since the dot-com implosion, there has been a tendency to forget about the Web's potential for economic growth. Two years ago, incestuous circular advertising links between web sites and declining click-through rates led many to pronounce online advertising dead. Many online ad sales staff lost their jobs, and companies shelved online investment until something better than the banner ad came along.
But it appears there's life in the banner ad yet. According to The New York Times, online advertising in 2004 is expected to reach $9.7 billion, or 3.7 percent of U.S. advertising spending, and is expected to grow 19 percent in 2005. Online news sites, in particular, can't keep up with demand and are looking for new ways to provide enough pages to fill ad inventory. That just might put a few online ad execs back in the work force.
It also has tremendously positive repercussions for Perl programmers and others who write the code that delivers those online page views. To acquire enough online ad-space inventory, media companies are buying up each other's most popular sites and adding content to their portfolios. All of this new content must be delivered dynamically, which means lots of lines of content-management code behind those web sites. Add to this the need to reorganize and repackage this content in new ways to maximize its reach and penetration, and you have a significant new burden in content-management chores.
Companies will undoubtedly rely as much as they can on off-the-shelf, turnkey systems to meet this burden. But they're going to need programmers. Anyone who has tried to deploy a turnkey content-management product for a media organization of any size knows this. Such systems rarely work right out of the box. They need to integrate with existing systems, and often need extra bits of functionality before they really meet the business plan. Even if it does fit the bill without modification, that rarely lasts for long. It's almost inevitable that two years down the road, the business plan will look very different, and so will the required functionality. The only way to meet these needs with any kind of agility is with programmers on staff to stitch together the pieces of content-management functionality on the fly.
The question that should be on the minds of these programmers is whether media companies will realize this fact, or instead spend another couple of years bumbling around with systems that cost more than the yearly salaries of a team of programmers and don't produce results like a team of programmers. There is perhaps reason to hope—an admittedly unscientific search on Craigslist.org for jobs in the SF Bay Area with "Perl" in the description currently turns up 281 hits, a big improvement over two years ago. The Web is not slowing down, nor is it settling into any kind of groove. Without programmers on staff, large content-management systems, whether proprietary or open-source, lock companies into ways of doing business that quickly become obsolete. There's nothing so agile as the human brain—the media industry should make sure they retain a few if they want their content management to be capable of the gymnastics necessary to make money online.
Kevin Carlson
Executive Editor
The Perl Journal