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Blimey! Online Spending Surpasses TV

OMFG! Overnight, Internet ad spending has surpassed TV adverting! Ok, it's in the UK, but this still marks a major moment for the "World" Wide Web, and has clear implications for the U.S. market.

"What this switch indicates is that a corner has been turned in consumer and advertising habits, and there's probably no turning back, given the relentless rise of the Web as an entertainment medium," writes Fast Company. "When the same corner is turned in the U.S. advertising business -- which equated to roughly $60 billion in the first six months of 2009 -- it'll have enormous after-effects for the future of TV and even other media like newspapers and magazines."

In the UK, the Web now accounts for 23.5% of all ad money, while TV ad spend accounts for 21.9% of marketing budgets, according to a report by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. TV advertising, meanwhile, fell about 17% year-on-year in the first half, to just over $2.5 billion, according to the report.

UK advertisers spent about $2.8 billion on Internet advertising in the six months to the end of June, a 4.6% year-on-year increase, according to the report. To put this in perspective, in 1998, when the IAB first measured Internet advertising, just over $31 million was spent online.

All told, it took the Internet little more than a decade to become the biggest advertising sector in the UK.

Guy Phillipson, the chief executive of the IAB, reckoned that there is still significant growth potential left in the internet ad market, saying: "We could absolutely see it grow to being a 30% medium [of share of ad spend], to go past ($6.4 billion) to even ($8 billion) annually ... Online display advertising has plenty of room for growth."

Read the whole story at Guardian et al. »

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