You know you’re in trouble when economists start agreeing with each other. At the moment they’re pretty unanimous that 2008 could bring major problems.

So if the global financial upheaval does get worse, how will it affect small and medium players in creative, informational and social web industries - people like me and, possibly, you?

That’s a question that hasn’t attracted as much attention as it deserves. The web barrels merrily on: internet marketers sell stuff to other internet marketers; bloggers write posts about how to make money blogging; and Facebook continues turning itself into a kind of universal, semantic spam fritter. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the whole incestuous merry-go-round whirls on as normal.

But the times are turning. Even though the Fed and the Bank of England have cut interest rates, the banks know that consumers, companies and nations are in hock up to their eyeballs. The market has been sold almost as much cheap debt as it can take. Lenders are jittery about lending to each other. The UK has just had its first run on a bank for a century and a half. Quarter-point base rate cuts might prevent a crash, but they’re not going to change much else. The shortage of credit is likely to continue, and perhaps worsen.

I’m not an economist, but I’m going to make two predictions.

2008 is going to be painful for copywriters, marketers and designers. Credit scarcity puts the brakes on start-ups, product launches, marketing campaigns and company expansions. When times are tight, the advertising budget is the first one to get cut. There will still be work available, but probably not enough to support the proliferation of freelance specialists, consultants and gurus whose presence we’ve enjoyed (if that’s the right word) for the past five years.

2008 might be a relatively good year for bloggers and other online advertisers. The ‘advertising gets cut during recessions’ rule hasn’t been tested in the current online environment. During previous downturns, the dominant advertising medium was TV. Campaigns were expensive and their results hard to track. Large-volume ad spends could be seen as luxuries.

It’s easier to measure the results of web campaigns, and they’re cheaper to produce and manage than TV commercials. If times get harder, big corporations might pull out of traditional media even further and increase investment in online campaigns - good news for bloggers, and perhaps for the owners of social networks, too.

So, a potential decrease in traditional media and SME-originated marketing (bad for freelancers) and a potential increase in big online campaigns from major players (good for bloggers).

Let’s all revisit this post in December 2008 and laugh at how wrong I was.