Online Ad Revenue Drops As A Whole But Search Ad Revenue Up

I was just reading an interesting report at Adage.com concerning online advertising revenue results (based on an IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers report) for the first half of the year and how the economic downturn had affected advertiser spend. I found a few of the numbers interesting in the report, numbers talk so here are a few things to point out:

• Overall Internet advertising spend dropped 5.3 percent to 10.9 billion compared to last years comparable period.
• Search advertising revenue grew by 2 percent.
• Last year search revenue accounted for 44 percent of the overall spend, this year it was 47 percent.
• Digital video ad spend was UP 38 percent.

One thing that really stuck out to me since I just left the telecommunications industry is that telecom ad spending was up 1 percent.

Now, although overall spending was down it was still positive compared to other advertising mediums such as newspaper and radio which have faced even steeper declines in advertising revenue.

Social networking sites have seen a large growth surge in time spent on the site over the first half of the year and revenue has also grown (doubled). Personally I think social media will be of concern to some as people begin to rely on their social network for references to other sites and products and as such SEO consultants and search marketing in general really have to think about what that means for their business. If online revenues doubled for search networks that tells me people are content to stay on Facebook, Twitter, or others and not head to the search engines and suddenly normal Google or Bing search becomes a bit less valuable (don't worry Google is not going anywhere but Facebook and Twitter matter more for search than people may realize).