IABUK : Internet ad spend grows 4.6 per cent

Online advertising expenditure grew 4.6% to £1.75 billion in H1 2009, overtaking TV for the first time.

IAB figures show ad expenditure online up £82m to record market share of 23.5%.

Wednesday, 30 September 2009

In the first half of 2009 internet advertising weathered the recession and grew by 4.6% to £1,752.1m, despite the entire advertising sector contracting by 16.6% during the same period.

According to the bi-annual online advertising expenditure study from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) - the trade body for digital marketing - in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the World Advertising Research Centre (WARC) - the internet has now overtaken TV advertising to become the UK’s single biggest advertising medium.

The UK remains the world leader in terms of market share for online, with the medium accounting for 23.5% in the first half of 2009. The results signal a significant restructure of marketing budgets as advertisers follow their audiences online and look to the internet for even more measureable and accountable methods.

Search, classifieds and online display

Paid-for search continued to grow, proving itself a mainstay of marketing budgets with a 6.8% increase from H1 2008 to H1 2009. As the purest form of direct response advertising, search is proving recession-friendly with marketers investing £1.05bn during H1 2009, which equates to 59.8% of all online advertising expenditure.

Despite the property market crash and stalled automotive and recruitment sectors, classifieds grew by 10.6% to £385m – or 22% of all online ad spend – reaping the benefits of the continued migration of advertising from print to online formats.

Online display was down 5.2% year on year to £316.5m, with an 18.1% share of all online advertising revenues. Online display buoyed a tough year as all other mainstream media saw a double digit decline.

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