Although traffic for financial news is swelling, the advertising industry is seeing its most difficult period in decades, both due to the economic turmoil that began globally in September, Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang said Wednesday at the Internet Advertising Bureau's Engage conference in London, Media Guardian reported.

"We are watching carefully (because we are) not sure whether a consumer-led recession will impact (the search sector)," Yang said, according to Media Guardian. "We do see search continuing to grow but the only question is whether people will search for commercial or non-commercial items."

However, user engagement and usage saw “tremendous growth” in the third quarter, Yang told the conference, and performance-based online ads, such as direct response and search ads, are still growing, despite the overall industry slump, Media Guardian reported.

Yang advised online content providers to find new ways of matching their content with advertising for better targeting, and advised advertisers to make sure their ads are targeted correctly and get immediate response from users, MarketingWeek reported.

“I firmly believe that the online ad marketplace will be able to see out the recession and offer brands a personalised service, which is hard to match elsewhere. However, the current systems for placing display ads online are still stuck in the dark ages - they are manual and inefficient for advertisers to want to use,” Yang told the conference, according to MarketingWeek.