Business Week asked the question this week:

"Google: Are Ad Concerns Overblown? – The number of ad clicks fell in January for Google and Yahoo. But how important are those click-through rates, anyway?"

"comScore (SCOR) said clicks on ads placed on Google were little changed in January from a year earlier, and that they fell 12% from the last three months of 2007. For Yahoo, ad clicks fell 3% from the fourth quarter."

According to Google and Yahoo, Internet Advertising is alive and well.  But others have questions.  The detractors say:

• "Advertisers are simply bidding on and buying fewer keywords."
• "Credit-strapped consumers are simply doing less shopping online, and therefore clicking less often on the ads that direct them to retail sites.
• "We remain concerned that a slowing U.S. and possibly global economy could further hinder Google’s growth," Stanford Group analyst Clay Moran wrote.

But Google, Yahoo and their friends say:

• Google co-founder Sergey Brin, contends that an economic downturn will accelerate a shift in spending from radio, print, and TV advertising to the Web. "It makes a lot of sense for advertisers, if they want to be careful about their spending and they want to make sure they are getting a good ROI to use the exact kind of advertising that we are offering.
• Barbara Baldwin, senior director of Polycom’s global brand programs, says her company has no plans to reduce spending in 2008. "During a recession it’s really important to maintain a consistent presence, rather than dropping your campaigns and then trying to restart," she says.
• "I think click-through was not a great measure to start with," says Michael Leo, co-founder of Avenue A/Razorfish, which was acquired by Microsoft (MSFT), and current CEO of ad software and consulting company Operative. "I don’t think clicks tell us what is going on."
• "This myopic fixation on clicks really does a disservice to the publishers who are putting together the inventory and the advertisers who are not getting a real sense of the performance," says John Chandler, principal analyst at Atlas, a division of Microsoft’s advertiser and publisher solutions business.

What do you think?  Will a decrease in ad clicks torpedo the ad sales industry, and cripple all the new start-ups relying on advertising revenue?  Does the loss of these start-ups spell major doom?  Or does it merely allow for consolidation?  And is this consolidation needed anyway?