For starters, ‘paid search’ refers to a type of contextual advertising where Web site owners pay an advertising fee, usually based on click-throughs or ad views to have their Web site search results shown in top placement on search engine result pages, as www. We were introduced to paid search by a search engine marketing agency out of the UK - those were the pre-Google IPO days, no one knew how big ’search’ or Google was going to be? The search market has grown from $100 million to about $15 billion over the last four years - it has already become 55 per cent of the total online advertising market of the world. However, I believe that all mediums shall become contextual in nature, thus the share of the contextual advertising pie would be nearly as large as the advertising pie of the world, which is expected to be $1 trillion over the next four years. World wide, the search market is already 55 per cent of the total Internet advertising spends, I expect the Indian percentage pie of search to be larger. The total amount of advertising spend on Internet medium this year is expected to be Rs 410 crore, while the total advertising spend on print is expected to be Rs 6,000 plus crore. read more