Newspapers, dominating as a category last year, attracted RM3.9 billion in advertisement expenditure - a 14.2% hike from the year before - and free-to-air TV advertising expenditure jumped 18.2% to RM2.9 billion.

As a category, newspapers are pretty much in the news, these days, what with all the gossip and rumours that readers are fashionably taking the pay TV, online and digital highways, again foretelling a  trend that would  bury newspapers altogether.

According to figures by Nielsen, pay TV adex alone totalled RM1.95 billion in 2010.

Last month, media-related companies turned to the public with initial public offerings (IPO) on Bursa Malaysia Securities and the list of companies included Media Prima Bhd, Star Publications (M) Bhd, Media Chinese International Ltd and Berjaya Media Bhd, and it was believed that Catcha Media Bhd would follow.

If so, it would not be the first time for Catcha, the first being in April 2000 when the NASDAQ crashed while Catcha was on a global IPO roadshow. The IPO was aborted and the company become a victim of the dot.com bubble.

The next was in 2008, when it said the public offer would be designed to allow the company the strength and resources to continue to consolidate the Malaysian publishing markets, amongst other plans. Catcha Publishing said proceeds from the IPO would be used to launch more titles locally and regionally and advance into the online media sphere, which is experiencing massive growth globally. Catcha Media’s portfolio includes 14 magazine titles like Homepride, Prestige Malaysia, Prestige Lifestyle, Malaysian Evo, Stuff, Supercars, Performance Heroes and K-Zone. It also has joint ventures with Microsoft, Catcha Group Pte Ltd, Catcha Media Holdings and Catcha Digital Pte Ltd.Why the current media trend to list? Well, because advertisers are actually spending more (by 15.8% to a record RM7.66 billion, last year) and with the heady competition from digital and online, newspapers simply need the resources to expand their reach and stay alive.

The market for media companies has been volatile. Media Prima looked at a 6.15% drop. Berjaya Media’s fell 5.56%.

In contrast, the Star Publications share went up by more than 5%, and Media Chinese International Ltd by almost 4%.

TheEdge FinancialDaily also recently reported, "Having seen its cash pile diminish significantly, Star Publications (M) Bhd is proposing to raise up to RM750 million from the capital market to boost its war chest. The amount makes the proposed exercise Star Publications' largest fund-raising effort to date."

Buzzcity, the mobile media company offering advertising programmes says 2011 is not a year for ads. So why would they turn customers away from their business?

by Josh Sklar, Founder / Heresiarch of Heresy, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , http://heresy.me

It may have been more impressive when fire was first demonstrated to primitive man, but the effect of Google Instant on our world may prove more exciting in the long run than basic combustion has. Now it’s not as if Google invented the idea or technique of completing a word or phrase by best guess as you type it; after all, Google Suggest is just a modern version of what has been on mobile devices for well over a decade, though it is infinitely more accurate and would’ve been especially handy on my Nokia as I pecked out pithy notes on their tiny keypads of the late 1990s. (Yes, kids, we had the wire-free phones back in the 20th century.) Google didn’t even invent the concept of predictive real time results materialising as you’re typing and correcting. In fact, the largest social networks in the world, including Facebook and LinkedIn, have had that feature available in their internal search interfaces for quite some time; however not everyone sits there and uses internal search engines several times a day. But I bet they use Google over and over.

Prior to Google Instant, the most significant change the company made to their user interface in the past few years was to appreciably increase the size of the input box last September. They did it then because more and more people were noted to be typing natural language questions into search engines and needed space to see “Where is the best place in Chicago to get my oil changed?” vs. the old fashioned keyword search of “oil change Chicago review”. In other words (intentional bad pun), the generations that are online now possess different behaviors and expectations that, for years, have only been written about in future tenses as in, they’re coming, but so are personal jet packs and robot butlers. At last we’ve arrived, thanks to the billions inspired to go online or purchase now affordable handheld electronics, and a plethora of independent manufacturers forcing innovation across a spectrum of devices and applications. Today, Google Instant will save you 2 to 5 seconds per search (350 million user hours a year, they say) by anticipating your query and immediately beginning to deliver you relevant results you can quickly scan.

As exciting as it is for a principal tool in your new digital life to be enhanced with a clearly superior technology, that’s not the story. What you should be thinking about is that a utility that shapes the way we all learn, work, conduct business, connect with most people around us, market ourselves, and so on has made a significant leap that will begin to quickly affect all of these areas of our lives. You will start seeing this predictive and instant results-based technique everywhere because if it’s not present, people will be aggravated. They will quickly, oh so quickly, come to expect nothing less than how their most heavily relied upon and ubiquitous instrument works. Fortunately, the developer community is well connected, continually growing, and very aware. They are becoming quite adept at latching on to positive change and replicating it as a standard, and that’s what Google Instant became as soon as it went live, whether they invented anything or not.

There are already working models that have sprung up to give instantaneous results for finding addresses on live maps, sorting through music in iTunes, pulling up videos, getting live stock quotes, organising databases, and the list is already beginning to get endless as are the possibilities. But therein lies yet another challenge for advertisers already struggling to keep up with the pace of change – the easier and quicker it is to get to the page someone’s looking for, the less likely it is they’ll see paid advertisements. Rather than guessing at various keyword combinations and being exposed to numerous potential organic and paid results, the predictive results will allow people to scan much faster and then adjust on-the-fly before there is any true exposure to the ads. Google claims the page ranking algorithms remain the same (and thus SEO practices) despite the personalised experience of typing in your own sentences rather than obvious word combinations, but the effect on AdWords and the online advertising industry still remains to be seen.

What you should be thinking about is that a utility that shapes the way we all learn, work, conduct business, connect with most people around us, market ourselves, and so on has made a significant leap that will begin to quickly affect all of these areas of our lives. You will start seeing this predictive and instant results-based technique everywhere because if it’s not present, people will be aggravated... -Josh Sklar