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It is, of course, a pleasure to note that the online marketing sector has been on the receiving end of a lot of good news recently. The latest Bellwether Report has told us that confidence is continuing to rise in digital as a marketing channel. Its Q2 2004 Report - the quarterly survey of marketing budgets published for industry body the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) - shows that internet marketing grew faster than any other sector during that period. And it accounted for three per cent of all marketing expenditure last year.

The IAB has reported that, in the last six months of 2003, some 2.5 per cent of ad budgets were spent online. In July, it reported that some £353.6 million was spent on internet advertising in 2003, up from £196.7m in 2002.

Whether you agree with the way in which Google has gone about its IPO (see analysis, p17) or not, the fact that a search engine with such a reliance on advertising for revenue can command such interest speaks volumes for confidence in the sector and its future growth.

But, just as businesses are often defined by the way they react in tough times, so sectors - in the wider sense - can often be defined by how they react when times are good.

One thing that has often been impressive in the digital sector is the commitment of people and businesses to the wider good. A range of organisations - from the IAB to the AOP and IPA - have promoted areas of digital business, if not the whole sector itself, as growth occurs.

However, a growing market can put the members of such organisations under pressure as, naturally, the first instinct of businessmen and commercial players is to cash in when times are improving. It is not necessarily to put down the bedrock to shore up the foundations of a marketplace when an inevitable slowdown occurs.

Marketers are under just as much pressure to make hay in the good times. But they must caution that this isn't made at the expense of the brand or longer-term brand-building initiatives. Likewise, it should not be at the expense of creativity, in either strategy or execution.

As Charlie Dobres points out, the majority of marketers head to the big web sites for traffic and this may be at the expense of smaller, more diverse, and potentially useful, web sites.

Fortunately, there are some signs that the important issues - from measurement standards to regulation - are being noticed and, in some cases, tackled. The hope is that this will continue to be the case, even - in fact, especially - if the good news continues to come.