May 16, 2008

Online ads 10 % of US advertising spend

Fredrik Wass and the Swedish Jaiku community have conducted an interview with Google's Swedish Managing Director Stina Honkamaa and European Policy Manager Nicklas Lundblad.

An interesting interview, but one answer stuck the data nerd in me as just plain wrong. Stina Honkamaa claimed, if quoted correctly, that online had a 30 % share of U.S. advertising spend. (Update May 17th: Stina was misquoted. See comment from Nicklas Lundblad at bisonblog.)

After some digging I believe that the claim is (way) wrong and online's share in the U.S. is 10-15 % (depending on how the advertising market is defined). Which would be about the same as online advertising's share in Sweden (estimated to be around at 13-15 %).

Sources:

- IAB says that US Internet advertising spend for 2007 was $21.2 billion.
- TNS Media believes that the total US advertising market was worth $148.99 billion in 2007 (excluding paid search online and yellow pages advertising offline)
- eMarketer says that Internet's share of total US advertising spend is about 9-10 % (expected $27.5 billion in 2008), growing to 13 % in 2011.
- ZenithOptimedia expects 9.4 % ($44.5 billion) of global advertising spend to be spent online in 2008.
- ZenithOptimedia claim that more than 15 % of advertising spend is spent online in only four countries: United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

2 comments:

Mikael Zackrisson said...

I think an issue here is what you count as "ads". I´ve just heard a presentation here at Bonniers claimin that Bonniers has quite a large percentage of the online advertising market, but when you include other things such as classified ads, the figure drops dramaticalle (due to the success of Blocket.se). Maybe its a similar issue here.

Anonymous said...

So. In short: you are right. Stina is also right. I...on the other hand...should not be trusted to, like, write down what people tell me.

See:
http://bisonblog.blogs.com/blog/2008/05/jaikububblan-vs.html?cid=114949496#comment-114949496