• by Masha Geller , March 8, 2002

A few days ago I reported that according to Taylor Nelson Sofres' CMR, ad spending took an even bigger hit in 2001 than originally forecast - total measured media spending was down 9.7% to $98.21 billion in 2001, from $108.81 billion in 2000.

A number of people emailed back asking where online media fit into the picture, since there was no mention of online ad spending in the report. Well, that question was answered this morning by CMR’s Internet division CMRi.

Why in this age of integration CMR still feels the need to separate the Internet from the rest of the media world is a mystery to me, but aside from that, CMRi said that online ad spending dropped 14.7% in 2001, compared to the same time period in 2000, putting the total 2001 online ad spending at about $2.5 billion.

The biggest chunk of that went to Yahoo!, which took in about $344 million in online ad revenues, followed by AOL.com with $319 million and Excite with $126 million. Lycos, Netscape, AltaVista, WebCrawler, ESPN.com. MSN and Weather.com rounded out the top ten list.

eBay spent the most money advertising online - $45 million, followed by General Motors with $43 million and Providian Corp. with $29 million. Overall, retail was the top online ad spending sector, channeling more than $533 million into online ads, followed by Media and Advertising and Financial sectors.

Not surprisingly, CMRi officials are saying that 2002 is showing signs of improvement and they’re expecting to see an upswing in spending by the third quarter of this year. In fact, CMRi president and CEO David Peeler said that Internet spending will “lead the way in 2002 in terms of significant growth, up 8.8% from its 2001 total.”

I hope his prediction proves to be on target.