Digital News South Africa

Online Advertising Statistics

The latest figures, although unimpressive at face-value, are encouraging when taking the overall economic downturn into account.

eMarketer indicates that:

- Almost 75% of online advertising real estate goes unsold
- Banner CPMs continue to decline
- Roughly 99% of banner ads are not clicked on
- Research indicates that new larger ad units are improving branding and direct-response metrics
- To date, 90% of online ads are direct-response oriented
10% of consumers' daily media usage is online, but only 2.9% of media dollars are spent accordingly.
- Online ad spending is expected to hit $7.6 billion by year-end 2001 (a 7% growth from year-end 2000*).
- Online ad spending will continue to grow to a projected $10.3 billion in 2002

* 7% doesn't seem like much growth considering the hay day of online advertising. However, if you look at the overall economic downturn it's no surprise. One may even walk away feeling that online advertising is not the center of a pending economic disaster.

While CMR reports:

- Total ad spending for the first half of 2001 came in at roughly $47.5 billion
- Total ad spending for the same timeframe in 2000 was $50.4 billion
- Syndicated television saw gains of 5.1% year-to-date
- Cable television showed gains of 4.6% year-to-date
- Whereas Print, Spot, and Network television all saw ad spending decline this year

* In comparison, 7% growth for online advertising seems like a comparatively stable figure. With the Tech and .Com bubbles pseudo-behind us, it will be an interesting time moving forward as we see more blue chip and consumer goods advertisers venture into online advertising. For those of us in the media world, this is an exciting opportunity as we look to counter and/or leverage the above bullets for our clients.

Source: About.com

Let's do Biz