Social Machinery

Probably we’ve reached a key milestone in the history of online advertising. For the first time in UK, the internet advertising spending exceeded TV during the first half of 2009, according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers.

By this way, online advertising has grown 100 times during the last 10 years.

One of the biggest catalysts for this exponential increase has been the economic downturn that is moving advertisers spending from the off line world to digital media as a way to get a better return on investment.

But UK is not the first country to reach such amazing milestone. Sweden online advertising investment surpasses TV spending during year 2008. The interesting fact about UK situation is that even do overall advertising spending has been affected by sharp drop of 16.6% during this year, online advertising increased 4.5%, representing 24% of total ad investment against 22% of TV.

From a global perspective, ad spending is expected to drop 5.5% to $417 billion in 2009, but will have a slight growth during 2010 of roughly 1.5% according to GroupM latest report. The growth will be mainly supported by emerging market bloc so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

Digital media will continue to display a strong growth, rising from 10% of worldwide ad spending in 2007 to 15% during 2010. Newspapers will be the most affected industry in terms of ad investment falling 20%, according to this report.