Soda - Keeping Curious

The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers have released their figures for online advertising in the US for the first half of 2006.

Indications are that the total spend of $7.9 billion is looking to surpass estimates for 2006 given at the end of last year. New estimates show an increase of 38% on last years total, bringing the current yearly spend to a healthy $16.5 billion.

Search advertising was accountable for 40%, unchanged from last years figures. A combined 31% of spending was on traditional banner advertising, “rich media” adverts, sponsorships and video advertising. Classifieds making up the rest.

Last week Terry Semel, CEO of Yahoo, warned of a slowdown in two of their largest sectors, ‘autos and financial services’. At the time, analysts indicated their belief that this was not a market wide problem, expecting growth to continue. David Silverman of PWC indicated that further growth in new sectors such as video advertising would increase spending.

YouTube, the popular video sharing site reported in July that it was serving 100 million videos per day. As yet, it has made little effort to exploit video advertising.