The Sydney Morning Herald has published a story about the apparently low revenues reported from Google's Australia business, despite the high estimated revenues being received from search advertising.

The article says that Google Australia booked just under $90 million for the year ending December 31 2008, according to documents filed with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. However, Google is estimated to have received $800 million in revenue from AdWords advertisers across the country, based on IAB figures.

Not surprisingly, Google has refused to comment about the article and continues to keep the details of its revenue sources secret.However, as most AdWords advertisers in Australia know, the billings for their campaigns are channelled through the Google office in Eire, where the revenues are going to be lost amongst the wider European income streams and, as far as Google is concerned, protected from the prying eyes of journalists and, more importantly, competitors.

The Australian Government has announced plans to build a national broadband network as a major infrastructure project to improve Internet access and speeds for the future. As reported by The Australian, the announcement was made by Kevin Rudd, outlining the plans to create a government-owned company to develop and run the National Broadband Network.

Having rejected a number of proposals by corporate contractors to develop the network, the Government has now decided that it will make the initial investment through a joint-company with developers, but intends to sell its interest within 5 years of the network's completion, depending on market conditions and national and identity security considerations. The project will invest up to $43 billion over eight years and the Government will initially put $4.7 billion to the project. Other funding will come from private investors, including through the issue of bonds to the general public.

The network will go beyond 'fibre to the node' to provide 'fibre to the premises', which means laying real optical fibre direct to properties rather than just a down the street. According to the Government, the network will connect 90% of all Australian homes, schools and workplaces with broadband services with speeds of up to 100 megabits per second, 100 times faster than those currently used by many households and businesses. It will also connect all other premises in Australia with next generation wireless and satellite technologies that will deliver broadband speeds of 12 megabits per seconds.

The project will directly support up to 25,000 local jobs on average every year during the eight year construction period and work is expected to begin in July, in Tasmania. Comment on the plans and the likely outcome has been made by The Sydney Morning Herald.

The latest quarterly figures for online advertising spend in Australia have been released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, using data collected by Pricewaterhouse-Coopers. These show that online display advertising has lost further market share in this sector to classified and search advertising, although the sector as a whole continues to show good growth.

The figures just published for the quarter to March show that the total online advertising market grew by over 30% on the same period last year, up $90.5m to $384.5m. Display advertising's share of this spend fell from 25.5% to 24.6% year-on-year, whereas classifieds grew from 27% to 27.7% and search rose from 47.4% to 47.7% - although this latter sector is still dominated by Google who refuse to reveal actual figures, so this data is based on PwC's estimate.

However, the change in sector share between the March quarter and the previous quarter to the end of December shows that display advertising lost 3 share points while classifieds rose 1.8 points and search by 1.2 share points. This may be indicating the start of a slowdown in online advertising due to possible concerns in an economic slowdown, although overall the market is still growing at a much healthier rate than any other advertising sector.