Want a firsthand lesson in the health of the Internet? Ask a friend a simple question: “What’s your favorite online ad?”

Chances are they’ll have a tough time giving an answer. Some may mention a dancing girl seducing you to refinance a mortgage; others may bring up one of the online executions of the Mac vs. PC television campaign.

But many people cannot recall any online advertising, despite all the time each of us spends on the Web and the thousands of ads we’ve all seen.

Why isn’t there more memorable advertising on the Web? The answer is multifaceted, but the bottom line is simple: While the Web is working fine for search and direct response advertisers (”What’s your credit score?”; “Rent from Netflix!”), it has yet to blossom for products that aren’t regularly searched for or purchased online.

This latter type of advertising, called “brand” in the lingo of the Web, relies on compelling, memorable creative to open the hearts or minds of consumers. Brand advertisers like Procter & Gamble use TV as their standard for creative excellence, and so far, the Internet hasn’t met the challenge, despite its potential. Pages are too cluttered; consumers have grown “blind” to the industry-standard spaces; and metrics like “page views” or “impressions” encourage sites to expose us to as many ads as possible during our time online.

So, while brands continue to invest in the Web, and there have been many documented cases of ROI, the real money continues to stay in traditional media — TV, radio and even print — despite the Internet’s gains in audience.

Combined with a crappy economy, this presents a very bleak situation for great sites like Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, and The New York Times. These sites must profitably cover their investments in content and innovation, yet they can’t compete with Google for search dollars, and what they earn from direct response advertisers typically comes in the form of pennies-on-the-dollar remnant sales via ad networks.

The big sites need brand advertisers to come onto the Web and pay premium prices for the privilege. Fat chance in today’s environment.

So, what is to be done?

First, sites must devote better — not necessarily more — real estate to advertising, and reduce page clutter. As long as publishers offer small ads in a cluttered environment, advertisers will continue to invest elsewhere.

Second, publishers need to consider selling on the basis of time, not just impressions. A small ad blinking away for a few seconds may be optimal for direct response advertising, but it won’t help Oil of Olay convince you of the benefits of its latest age-defying formula. Sure, video advertising may help solve this in the future, but it cannot drive enough revenue to support the rest of the Web. And frequency — showing the same weak ad 12 times — doesn’t make Web advertising more compelling.

Lastly, the industry must avoid pinning shortfalls in revenue on the bad economy. Sure, the economy will have some effect. But unless more of us can easily name our favorite online ads, the problem is clearly more fundamental. Let’s use 2009 as the year to set the Web on the right course for long-term profitability by improving its effectiveness for brand advertisers.

Adweek is a unit of the The Nielsen Company

Television
-Men typically watch less TV than women their age — with one exception: male teens actually watch more TV than female teens.  Men ages 18 to 34 tend to watch more cable and pay channels, while women gravitate to broadcast networks.

-When it comes to sports programming on TV, men 18-34 are more attentive viewers (+12%) than women of the same age.  But when non-sports programming is on, the reverse is true: males 18-34 are 6% less attentive than their female counterparts.

-In general, men 18-34 are less attentive viewers of both sports (-8%) and non-sports (-10%) TV programs than older men ages 35 and up.

-Men 18-34 are also more receptive to product placements within TV programming than females their age; they report 26% higher brand opinion improvement for advertisers integrated into TV programs.

Online
-Online streaming videos of full-length TV episodes hold the attention of men 18-34 much more than the same programs on TV.

-In general, men 18-34 view more Web pages each month than women their same age (2,353 vs. 2,305 in August 2008).  Men 18-34 also view 63% more individual video streams than women their age (1.4 million vs. 893,000 streams in August 2008).  For their part, women typically spend more minutes watching videos online than men (4.1 minutes vs. 2.4 minutes), who prefer short-form videos on consumer-generated media sites like YouTube. 

Mobile
-Male mobile subscribers ages 18 to 34 are three times as likely as average mobile subscribers to watch video on their phones, and twice as likely as average mobile users to access the mobile Web.

-In Q2 2008, male mobile subscribers ages 18-34 sent and received more than twice as many text messages (531 texts on average, per month) as phone calls (246 calls on average, per month), while women 18-34 made slightly more mobile phone calls than men their age (251 vs. 246 calls per month).


Video Games
-Men ages 18 to 34 averaged approximately 19 gaming sessions in August, with the average session lasting about 66 minutes.  Among all males, men 18-34 accounted for 35% of all minutes played on gaming consoles in August.

-In comparison, women 18-34 logged fewer gaming sessions in August (just over 10, on average), but — like their male counterparts — averaged about 65 minutes of play per session.  Women 18-34 accounted for 39% of all minutes played by females on gaming consoles in August.

Seventy-three percent of Chrome’s visitors were men, with males 35-49 accounting for 39% of all traffic.  Female visitors were more likely to be in the 18-34 age group.

Overall, nearly 1.4% of all U.S. Internet users who went online from home or work between September 1 and September 7 visited the page, which typically indicates a download.

Consumers also flocked to the blogosphere to discuss Chrome.  Buzz about the new browser spiked on September 2, the browser’s first day of availability, and peaked the following day, with mentions in nearly one percent (0.92%) of all online consumer discussions, according to Nielsen. 

Online buzz about Chrome easily outpaced buzz about competitor browsers Firefox (0.4%), Internet Explorer (0.2%), Safari (0.09%), and Opera (0.07%). 

View the full press release.

Read coverage of Nielsen’s findings in Information Week, the International Business Times, and on CNET.com.

In June, there were 253 million people online in China, the government reported Friday.  The new figures indicate that China’s Internet population grew by 56% in the last year. 

In comparison, the stories noted that the U.S. had approximately 223.1 million Internet users in June, according to Nielsen Online.