• November 26, 2007

Financial services remain the largest online advertising category in the United States, after the conglomeration of "consumer related" categories such as automotive and media advertisers, according to eMarketer Senior Analyst Lisa Phillips.

The industry accounted for 15% of all online advertising in the first half of 2007, or $1.5 billion worth of Internet ads, an increase of 18.7% over the same period in 2006, according to eMarketer calculations of the latest figures released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers (IAB/PwC).

That equals the industry's entire online spending for 2005, when financial services accounted for just 12% of the total US online advertising spend.--Tanya Irwin