Results from the bi-annual online spend survey by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), carried out in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the World Advertising Research Centre (WARC), are hot off the press and show continued growth in internet marketing, despite a depressed UK advertising market as a whole.
Internet marketing showed a 40.3% like-for-like annual growth for the first half of 2006, representing a half year high of £917.2 million (£630.5 million a year ago).
Perhaps more significantly, online advertising’s market share now stands at 10.5%, within 1% of national press which recorded an 11.4% share for the first half of 2006.
TV, press, radio, and direct mail have all experienced declining revenues in the past six months, but online has buoyed the advertising market by contributing an additional £284 million to total UK advertising revenues.
Online advertising is the fastest growing advertising medium in the UK and is now:
- Double the size of consumer magazines (4.6%)
- Three times the size of radio advertising (3.4%)
- Half the size of the TV advertising market, which recorded a 22.7% market share following a decline of 1.3%.
Paid search was 57.7% up year-on-year to £531.3 million – a share of 57.9% of the online total. Figures that prove how advertisers have adopted the format not only as a direct response tool but to help build their brands and secure an online presence.
Clearly a very strong performance in a tough market that has witnessed declining advertising expenditure in most media. If the strong performance continues, this will be the year where online advertising becomes a £2 billion medium.