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The recession in online advertising, which began in the first quarter of 2009, continued into the second. Every quarter we keep track of the combined advertising revenues of the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL), which together represent the lion’s share of all online advertising revenues and is a decent proxy for the market as a whole. In the second quarter of 2009, their combined global ad revenues were $7.864 billion, down 3.4 percent from a year ago.

In economics, a general rule of thumb is that two down quarters marks a recession. Last quarter saw the first annual decline in advertising revenues of 2.1 percent. And the annual decline this quarter got a little worse. However, on a sequential basis compared to last quarter, it is actually pretty much flat (but still down 0.18 percent). So we now have two down quarters on both an annual and sequential basis.

Will this recession continue into the current quarter, or did we just witness a fundamental “reset”, as Steve Ballmer likes to call it. What that implies is that advertising revenues have been reset to a lower level from which they can once again grow. We’ll see what happens in the third quarter, but anecdotally I am hearing from advertising startups that the worst is behind us.

This may be wishful thinking, of course. But barring any new economic catastrophe, the advertising levels of the past two quarters seems like the new floor. But how long will it take to get up off that floor?

These numbers represent global advertising revenues, and include network revenues paid to affiliates through AdSense and Yahoo’s ad network. Google’s licensing revenues for Google Enterprise Apps have been stripped out. For the other companies, we include only the advertising portions of their online revenues as reported in their quarterly earnings statements.

Below is a table with all the numbers:

Online Advertising Revenues (in millions)

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12seconds showed off a really slick-looking new iPhone app at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp earlier this month. Unfortunately, that’s not quite ready yet. But in the meantime, they have another iPhone app that is ready, and it’s about as simple as can be — which may be good thing.

Called 12cast, the app claims to be the “simplest way to get video on Twitter.” Here’s how it works, you open the app, enter a title for the video, then rotate it to the left to bring up the video camera. You then record footage, hit send, and you’re done. (If you’re not logged into Twitter, there will be a prompt that comes up to allow you to do that.)

If the video you shot was over 12 seconds, it will only take the first 12 seconds. And because of the 12seconds limit, the uploading of the video occurs very quickly. And you can also use footage you’ve already shot and saved, by clicking the “library” link on the title page. Again, the 12 second rule will be in place.

As with the larger 12seconds app they’re working on, 12cast is all about using the video service on top of the Twitter social graph. The goal here was to build an app with the lowest barrier way to put video onto Twitter. The plan for a future update is to include Facebook Connect as well.

Obviously, this app will only work with the new iPhone 3GS, which has video capabilities.

The app will be available for free in the App Store at some point later today. (Update: The app is now live, here.)

12cast introduction and overview from Sol Lipman on Vimeo.

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