WebProNews

Tag: Online Advertising

  • Marketeers to Spend $36 Billion for Online Ads this Year

    Magnaglobal, a devision of IPG Megabrands, has released their forecast for ad expenditures for 2012 and they claim, non-traditional spending, in other words, online advertising, will increase by over 12% this year. That means marketeers and advertisers will be sinking about $36 billion into internet advertising alone.

    Vincent Letang, EVP and head of global forecasting at MagnaGlobal comments on the increased spending:

    “Encouraged by the rise of smartphone and tablet usage and the availability of scalable platforms, mainstream advertisers are now fully embracing all mobile formats (display, search, video, in-app),”

    Amongst other growth expected this year are mobile-targeted ad revenues, forecasted to grow by as much as 53%, and paid search, expected to grow by 24%. The big spenders this year are expected to come form technology, telecom, and finance, which comes as no surprise after seeing what consumers are spending their budgets on.

    As you might expect, most retail manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies won’t be spending as much due to poor sales. The automobile industry might cut back the most on ad spending on account of steep increases in fuel prices. Overall, the weak economy, hurt by unemployment and conservative spending, doesn’t look all that great.

    Magnaglobal does say that spending revolving around the upcoming elections and the 2012 Summer Olympics could spur some revenue growth in the latter half of 2012. We’ll have to wait and see what financial news the rest of 2012 brings, but it doesn’t look that encouraging overall.

  • Google to Add Breadcrumb URLs to AdWords

    Google will soon begin to implement “breadcrumb trails” into their text AdWords ads. Breadcrumb trails refer to a set of links that show the path to various categories within a website. In the Google-provided example, a shoe site ad could have breadcrumb links to the subcategories of “women’s shoes” and “sandals”:

    The example image below is from a Google support page for AdWords describing the feature as a component of a text ad. The feature has not been officially announced by Google and the only information on it is the AdWords support page and a support page for webmasters. The webmaster support page describes the rich snippet code that can be inserted into a website to enable use of the breadcrumbs feature. The breadcrumbs will taken from annotations on the landing page for ads, putting webmasters in control of what breadcrumb links are created, if any.

    Google's new breadcrumb links

    The existence of these mentions on support pages means Google is prepared to launch the feature soon, as the company has a history of publishing support pages ahead of product launches.

    The AdWords support document makes it clear that clicks on breadcrumb links count the same as clicks on normal cost-per-click (CPC) ads. This means customers will be charged the same amount whether a click occurs on a breadcrumb link or headline. That shouldn’t deter any advertisers, though, whose goal is to get customers onto their site in any way possible. More links in an ad means more ways to get to their site.

    What do you think? Will the new breadcrumb trails increase clicks for AdWords text ads? Are you planning to implement them for your site? Let us know in the comments section below.

    (via Search Engine Land)

  • Thinking Outside the Box of Banner Ad Clicks

    Thinking Outside the Box of Banner Ad Clicks

    Think seriously for a moment: when was the last time you legitimately saw an ad online and clicked on it to find out more about the product being advertised? Unless you said, “Never,” you are lying because nobody clicks on those pervasive distractions. The only time I even have an interaction with an ad is when I’m confronted with one of those sprawling bastards that go full-on face-hugger mode on my screen and completely block out all of the content that I’m trying to read/look at so I have to click on the X to remove the obstructing ad. Somewhere, some company might be generating ad revenue because I was attacked by the ad and had to interact with it, but my opinion certainly sours for that brand.

    If you can help it, you probably try to avoid looking at the ads and you may not even realize it. That’s fair, too: we don’t use the internet because we want to view a virtual catalog of products, we use the internet to watch videos of animals falling asleep in hilarious places and then occasionally take breaks to read the news. Get out of our way, ads.

    This willful avoidance of all banner ads is so prominent that it’s even taken on a common industry name: banner blindness.

    Nobody pays attention to these banner ads and yet they persist throughout the internet. How is that? Well, for one, they have to persist because that’s one reason why the internet is able to maintain its vaunted openness. Some news outlets have had to implement a paywall in order to make up for the lack of ad revenue in the digital market, but generally online ad sales are what keep the internet (in its current incarnation, at least) afloat.

    Regardless of your interaction with online ads, though, it turns out that simply having an ad be seen still counts more than anybody actually interacting with the ad. That much might sound obvious, but a new collaborative analysis by comScore and Pretarget today confirms that ad viewability and hover time are more strongly correlated with conversions than clicks or total impressions. The findings of the study suggest that the dusty model used by advertisers and media planners of trying to amass as many clicks as possible might need to be set aside in order to look to more meaningful metrics for evaluating a campaign’s performance.

    This seems to follow what Moat, developers of advertising tools, have anticipated due to their new ad platform, Metrics That Matter. The analytical tool is basically to your ads what Google Analytics is to your search traffic or what Facebook Insights is to your brand’s Page. With it, you will be able to see exactly what kind of engagement that people have with the site beyond just clicking on it.

    There have been some helpful how-tos about how to improve the deployment of banner ads but, realistically, banner ads aren’t sustainable. They get in the way – in fact, all advertising gets in the way: that’s why people change television channels when a commercial break pops up during their favorite Law & Order spin-off. Advertisers in the video medium have created a much better strategy for advertising that wholly circumvents the entire intrusion of ads, though, and it’s only now beginning to be experimented with in the online market: product placement.

    It’s worked out marvelously in the movie and television industry. I hadn’t even so much as thought about eating at Burger King in years until I saw Robert Downey, Jr., as Tony Stark mowing down on some Whoppers in Iron Man. I wanted to be charismatic and adventurous like Tony Stark, and surely if such a lifestyle was achieved by eating Whoppers, then that’s where I should start, too, in order to carve out my piece of the glamorous lifestyle.

    At least, that was the fantasy being packaged up in the product placement of Burger King food in that movie, and much to my embarrassment, it worked stupendously well.

    Granted, I don’t want to see a description of Taco Bell’s Loco Tacos in an article I’m reading in the New York Times about the on-going slaughter of Syrian protesters. But with the legions of blogs and more blogs out there in the internet, it’s somewhat dumbfounding that this hasn’t tactic hasn’t been successfully utilized.

    Facebook and Twitter have attempted some variation of this with their promoted/sponsored Tweets and promoted Stories, respectively, but neither one are really genuine or even compelling. At best, they’re contrived advertisements disguised in the skins of my friends’ and followers’ accounts. Seriously, Facebook, am I really supposed to take it that Mark M_____ is eager to let me know that he likes Hondas? No, and he probably doesn’t give a toss, either. If he thought I did, I’m sure he’s smart enough to know I’m smart enough to ask him.

    Promoted or sponsored posts represent the most prominent application of product placement on a website and so far the strategy appears to be working given Facebook and Twitter both have recently made some notable acquisitions. Since this ad experiment is really still the first generation of this type of embedded strategy, it certainly has some kinks to be worked out. Still, it’s novel, and as Nathan Kaiser expertly explained on nPost, novelty only works so long when it comes to online advertising. Given the ever-shrinking attention span of internet users, don’t be surprised if the half-life of this marketing strategy lasts less time than banner ads seem to have lasted.

    I’ve seen a similar strategy employed in some blogs I read wherein they’re labelled sponsored posts. It took me a few turns before I figured out that they weren’t actually posts from the blog I was visiting but rather an advertisement packaged to resemble a post on the blog. It was clever and, similar to every other advertising strategy, the novelty was lost on me after a while and now I just ignore them. That’s not to say that this innovation couldn’t be improved upon, though.

    Putting all of your marketing faith on click-throughs no longer seems like a safe bet or even a fair bet. Kirby Winfield, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at comScore, described how the comScore/Pretarget’s study highlights some of the major shifts on the horizon for the digital advertising community. “It demonstrates the perils of relying on click-throughs for measuring the performance of display ad campaigns, with this metric showing virtually zero correlation with total conversions,” Winfield said. “It’s time to start measuring the impact of campaigns using metrics that really matter, not just the ones that are most easily measured.”

    The current model does seem fairly inefficient and one-dimensional when you think about digital advertising in those terms. So for those of you working in the world of online marketing, how do you see the nature of advertising changing in the near future? Think there’s any use for analytic tools like what Moat has developed that could change the way advertising sales are structured for businesses? Let us know in the comments below.

  • Consumers Trusting Web Ads More, Though Not as Much as TV and Print

    A new study by Neilsen called the Global Trust in Advertising Survey, Q3 2011, has shown that while people generally don’t trust online ads, especially those on their mobile devices, they are beginning to open up to this form of marketing a bit, though not nearly as much as they do towards TV and print spots. Out of 28,000 consumers surveyed in 58 countries, it was found that social proofing, a form of advertising surrounding word of mouth from one’s social group, is the most trusted mode of advertising. It can be assumed the word-of-mouth segment in the study includes peer recommendations gleaned from the online social networks of those consumers surveyed, as online reviews were cited as the second most trusted form of marketing, at 70%.

    Word-of-mouth is trusted by 92% of respondents when making a purchase. Yet, only 29% of those queried trust text ads on their mobile phones, which makes sense, considering the amount of spam, scams, phishing, or smishing, as it is called via text. 46% and 47% of those surveyed trust ads in newspapers and on television respectively. Coming in at 50% was online newsletters that consumers subscribed to, and 67% don’t trust display ads on mobile devices or banner ads on the web. In 2007, 73% didn’t trust online ads, pointing to only a slight rise internet ad credibility.

    Interestingly, the study states that while consumers generally don’t trust more formal ad content online or via their mobile devices, they likewise trust friend recommendations the most, which is basically what Facebook and other social networks were made for. And, of course advertisers are savvy to this. Randall Beard, global head of advertiser solutions at Nielsen, states, “Many companies are already increasing their paid advertising activity on social networking sites, in part due to the high level of trust consumers place in friends’ recommendations and online opinions – Brands should be watching this emerging ad channel closely as it continues to grow.”

  • Online Ads: Twitter Followers More Likely to Buy

    Exacttarget.com has released a new study which reveals the fickle behavior of online consumers. The report was an attempt to nail down United Kingdom shoppers buying behavior by demographic, but the results only reinforced a well known truth; consumers behavior is as unique as the products they buy.

    With the ever increasing advertising presence on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the study examined how consumers were interacting and responding to the promotions. Surprisingly they found that only about 7% of users actually “followed” a brand on Twitter. This is a relatively minuscule number compared to the 45% who claimed they “liked” a brand on Facebook.

    While these numbers are worlds apart, there’s more going on here when it comes to actually purchasing a product. Of those in the study, almost a third of users were more likely to buy after “”following” a brand on Twitter. In contrast, less than a quarter of Facebook users purchased after “liking” a brand on the social platform.

    The bad news for both media platform: email is still outperforming them. Over 46% of consumers targeted by email ad campaigns purchased after receiving the ads. It appears social platforms still have some hurdles to clear before they can achieve a competitive success in consumer marketing.

    Still, advertising on these platforms is relatively new. With the heavy traffic on both Twitter and Facebook, I have no doubt they are real competitors.

    Tim Kopp, CMO at ExactTarget comments on the findings:

    “UK consumers expect more from brands than ever before as they turn to email, Facebook and Twitter for exclusive content, special offers and unique experiences,”

    “Agile marketers who can drive interaction across online channels and build consumer engagement have a clear advantage, and our Subscribers, Fans and Followers research provides the insight they need to understand what consumers expect.”

    If you’re in marketing, or you merely seek to understand the complex behavior of consumers in an online marketplace, you need to read this report. It’s not a definitive guide by any means, but it will help you understand a bit more about what motivates consumers to take action.

  • Google Online Marketing Challenge: Tips and Overview

    Google’s Online Marketing Challenge started in 2008 and began with 500 registered professors. Now there are over 1,000 professors registered with the growing challenge.

    The purpose of the challenge is to give students real world experience working with Google AdWords and online advertising. It also gives students the opportunity to see how they can grow real businesses and non-profit organizations by using online advertising.

    The challenge is open to any student who has a professor or university affiliate (i.e. researcher) willing to register for them.

    Professors must go to Google’s Online Marketing Challenge site and register, The student then registers under the professor’s name. If students wish to participate in groups of ( must be 3-6 people) the process is as follows: 1) Have professor register, 2) Students register under professor’s name, AND 3) Professor verifies the team members and registers accordingly.

    The deadline to apply for the challenge is May 1st.

    The challenge has several different categories of global and regional winners; there are challenge winners, social impact award winners ( for people who help non-profits), and social media winners( for people or groups who create and maintain Google+ pages).

    Prizes include a seven night stay in San Francisco, free tablet devices, free laptops, and $15,000 in donation to a non-profit partner.

    Challenge representatives in the YouTube video claim that the experience is a real resume booster.

    They also explained that you can advertise for your own personal blog.

    Contestants will receive a $250 credit to support their campaign which will run for three weeks and end on June 8th. But the process is not done until participants submit a post campaign report or social impact statement which is due by June 15th. This is where contestants explain what they have done and learned throughout the experience.

    The winners is determined by metrics.

    Students will work with their professors to put their submission together.

    Representatives in the YouTube suggested that they get a head start by reviewing the AdWords for beginners guide and watch short video tutorials on a google learning site devoted to online marketing.

  • Are You High on Yelp?

    On Friday, popular online review site Yelp began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The company had a successful first day with shares jumping from $15 per share initial pricing to nearly $25 per share, making early investors very happy.

    While the shares dipped 14 percent yesterday in the company’s second day of trading, some fluctuation is to be expected in the early days of trading. However, one can’t help but wonder if the high about Yelp will continue or diminish.

    Can Yelp meet investor and consumer expectations going forward? Let us know what you think in the comments.

    While Yelp has experienced significant growth since its launch in 2004, the company has also experienced its share of criticism, which is the reason people are questioning its future. Most people associate Yelp with restaurant and other business reviews, but it is actually an Internet advertising company. In other words, it competes with the likes of Google and Facebook.

    As we know, this marketplace is very competitive and is growing. Foursquare is even breaking into the review space by allowing users to offer local recommendations and tips after they check in to places of business.

    For Yelp, this means that it has to defend its position. The company has had a rough road in this sense as it has been accused of ripping off the small businesses that advertise through it. Rocky Agrawal on VentureBeat wrote:

    “At a time when much online advertising is being sold for 60 cents per thousand impressions (CPMs), Yelp is charging some local advertisers $600 per 1,000 impressions.

    That’s not a typo. Yelp is charging small businesses 1,000-times the standard online CPM rates for local ads that appear on Yelp. Even when compared to its own ads for national advertisers, the company is charging a 100x premium.”

    Unfortunately, for Yelp, many of its users feel that Agrawal presented an accurate portrayal of how Yelp’s advertising model works. In a follow up article written by WebProNews CEO Rich Ord that focused on “defending online advertising,” we received numerous comments similar to this one from AJ:

    Is Yelp misleading its advertisers? If so, how? Please share you experience with us.

    Francis Gaskins, President of IPODesktop In addition to these ongoing advertising concerns, there are also other issues regarding its advertisers and the economy. Francis Gaskins, the President of IPODesktop, told WebProNews:

    “In this flat-lined economy, customers that Yelp deals with are not experiencing a lot of growth, so they have to claw and fight for every ad dollar that they get.”

    This information raises some big red flags for investors in terms of long-term profitability, which is another questionable area of the company. Yelp has always struggled with making money, and the following chart shows that the company is actually losing money.

    An even greater red flag for analysts and investors, however, is the fact that Yelp relies on its competitor Google for traffic, which, of course, ultimately means that it depends on it for revenue as well. According to Yelp’s S-1 filing, the company revealed just how dominant of a role Google plays in its business:

    “Google in particular is the most significant source of traffic to our website accounting for more than half of the visits to our website from Internet searches during the year ended December 31, 2011.”

    Incidentally, Yelp has taken a particularly outspoken stance against Google claiming that it shows favoritism toward its own products in search results. The filing also stated:

    “Google has removed links to our website from portions of its web search product, and has promoted its own competing products, including Google’s local products.”

    Yelp’s stand against Google is similar to that of FairSearch.org, which is an organization made up of various companies that believe Google has monopoly power. The group and Yelp are working to encourage policymakers to take action against the search giant in order to, based on information from FairSearch’s site, “protect competition, transparency and innovation in online search.” Yelp has even testified toward this effort, but at this point, the government has not acted.

    When WebProNews spoke to Gaskins about these issues, he equated it to Demand Media/Google situation. If you remember, the companies had a deal where Google directed searches to Demand Media’s eHow platform. In Google’s infamous Panda algorithm update, this all changed.

    “I don’t know whether the people buying the stock… at $25 or $24 realize that Google can turn off half their revenue faucet by changing the algorithms and putting their own searches up there,” said Gaskins.

    He went on to say Google could easily do this since it is a private enterprise that controls its own products. As he explained, Google doesn’t need to worry about what could happen to Yelp.

    However, it is these concerns that have Gaskins and other analysts qualifying Yelp as a risky investment. Rick Summer, an senior stock analyst, recently wrote why his firm Morningstar wasn’t applying for Yelp’s IPO:

    “Unfortunately, the company faces challenges translating the small advertising budgets of local businesses into profitability, as about 70% of ad revenue is eaten up by sales and marketing expenses. Although we ultimately expect operating leverage and resulting profitability, success is far from certain.”

    It’s clear that Yelp has several challenges to overcome, but only time will tell if it can prove its naysayers wrong. Do you think it can? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

  • Groupon Kills Ads on Donald Trump’s Apprentice Website

    Online daily deals site Groupon announced today via blog post that they will be taking steps to ensure that no ads for their service appear on the website for “The Apprentice.”

    Apparently the rumor got around that Groupon was a sponsor of the hit NBC show “The Apprentice.”  It turns out popular online petition site Change.org hosted a petition entitled “Don’t Support Donald Trump and Boycott the Sponsors of NBC’s The Celebrity Apprentice!”  In the description of the petition, Groupon is named as a sponsor and monetary beneficiary of the show, which of course stars Donald Trump.  The petition also names Walt Disney, Enterprise Car Rentals and Sprint-Nextel as targets of the boycott.  From the petition letter:

    Since Mr. Trump is obviously supporting fringe elements of the American electorate and advocating for racism, xenophobia, and divisiveness in this country, the supporters of this petition feel strongly that the aforementioned companies should not advertise on Mr. Trump’s TV program.

    The above sentiment refers to recent press surrounding the celebrity.  Donald Trump is said to be flirting with the possibility of running for President on the Republican ticket.  His biggest controversy has been his support of the “Birther” movement.  That said movement took a huge hit Wednesday when President Barack Obama released his official long from birth certificate.  Some birthers are not swayed by this, however, as they have attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the certificate.  

    Groupon explains that they were never a sponsor of “The Apprentice,” their online ads simply appeared on the page because of their advertising agreement with NBC:

    Here’s the thing: Groupon has never been a sponsor of The Apprentice on TV or on the web. We invest heavily in online advertising through networks that place ads on a rolling basis, meaning that we know one will appear on NBC.com but not specifically which page. We know that some advertising appeared on the Apprentice home page a few weeks ago.

    But the company still sees it fit to remove advertising from the show hosted by the controversial Trump:

    Enough consumers have contacted us to warrant ensuring that we don’t place ads on the Apprentice homepage in the future. It’s the same reason we don’t run deals on guns or abortion…this isn’t a political statement, it’s avoiding intentionally upsetting a segment of our customers.

    This isn’t Groupon’s first ad controversy.  Earlier in the year, an ad campaign launched during the Super Bowl took fire, as many were offended by the nature of the ads.  The main ad that people took offense to was an ad starring actor Timothy Hutton which in part stated, “The people of Tibet are in trouble. Their very culture is in jeopardy. But they still whip up an amazing fish curry!” He then went into the Groupon pitch.  Groupon later apologized and pulled the series of ads.

  • Local Online Ad Revenue To Top $42 Billion

    Local Online Ad Revenue To Top $42 Billion

    Online/interactive advertising revenue is forecast to reach $42.5 billion by 2015, nearly double 2010’s $21.7 billion, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.4 percent, according to a new report from BIA/Kelsey.

    This growth is tied to anticipated improvement in the U.S. economy and a continued increase in overall local advertising, which is expected to reach $153.5 billion in 2015, up from $136.3 billion in 2010, representing a 2.1 percent CAGR.
    BIA-Kelsey
    As digital media — delivered to consumers through mobile, Internet or other electronic methods — continues to gain traction with local advertisers, BIA/Kelsey predicts it will represent 23.6 percent of all local ad spending by 2015.

    “As the business climate improves and advertisers step back into the market, they are gravitating to digital options that perhaps were not as mature before the recession began,” said Tom Buono, chief executive officer, BIA/Kelsey.

    “Our analysis indicates that as advertisers move to online, mobile and, particularly, the variants of social media, we are fast approaching a tipping point where digital media will soon become a dominant segment of the local advertising marketplace.”

    Other highlights from the report include:

    *The increased number of smartphones and tablets is already playing a role in affecting revenue shares earned by traditional media.

    *Continued significant newspaper revenue erosion will drive pay walls and other creative approaches for rebuilding revenue base.

    *The interactive/online sector continues to advance and multiply with new formats such as social and mobile.

    The report also found that social media is increasingly becoming an important part of online revenue. Consumer spending on deal-a-day offers, which the firm expects will grow to $3.9 billion by 2015, illustrates an expanding market that includes Facebook and Twitter.

    “What we’re seeing in terms of media share shifts and transformation is really unprecedented,” said Neal Polachek, president, BIA/Kelsey.

    “As we look forward, the core issue challenging advertisers is to figure out a media plan that leverages the transactional nature of digital media with the scale and reach of traditional media.”

  • Super Bowl Advertising On the Web

    Super Bowl Advertising On the Web

    As the Super Bowl approaches, so do the time-honored ads that will accompany it. Advertisers aren’t just turning to the game itself to capitalize, however. Many are turning to the web to get some mileage out of the event. The History Channel, for example, has turned to Yahoo, and will be running ads for a new Larry the Cable Guy show on Yahoo Sports to capitalize on the inevitable Super Bowl fan traffic. 

    We conducted a Q&A on the subject with Mitch Spolan, Yahoo VP of North American Field Sales. "The Super Bowl is such a unique situation," he tells WebProNews. "It’s the one time a year where consumers plan to watch the commercials as much as they watch the game. As consumers, we expect great advertising during the Super Bowl, and companies are rewarded and penalized based on their creativity." 

    "Online allows advertisers to compliment their broadcast investment with campaigns that continue to live on well beyond the 30 seconds," he adds. "While the Super Bowl is powerful for its tremendous audience reach, advertisers have the ability to reach the SAME super-sized audience every day online with marquee creative. There no longer is the need to wait for one day a year to have massive audience.  Advertisers control when and how they interact with their Super Bowl audience everyday online."

    Super Bowl commercials have something of a following on their own. I know people who don’t even care about the game, but like to see the new ads. How can a brand capture this kind of enthusiasm for advertising online?

    Mitch Spolan"At Yahoo!, we’re constantly innovating new advertising formats that open up the creative canvas to our advertising partners’ imaginations," Spolan tells us. "For example, when you come to one of the Yahoo! Sports properties during the Super Bowl, you’re going to find an ad that captures your attention with a narrative that’s as or even more compelling and engaging than those on TV. Online advertising also opens up other possibilities such as interactive and social sharing capabilities that can extend the brand’s message even further than a TV spot. Brands that combine creativity with smart use of the Web’s inherent advantages are the ones that enhance their storytelling ability and build experiences that stay with the consumer."

    If you’re wondering what your own starting point should be if you’re considering your own Super Bowl-related advertising, Spolan has some thoughts on that. 

    "First, anytime a brand is looking to capitalize on the excitement of big event like the Super Bowl, it should choose to work with a site that will be a destination for consumers well before and even after the event," he says. "The campaign that HISTORY channel is running for "Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy" on Yahoo! Sports is a good model for this. The network’s campaign begins to run on February 3, when excitement for all things Super Bowl will be at a fever pitch, and runs through February 11. 

    "The Super Bowl, like other culturally significant events on the calendar, is among Yahoo!’s biggest traffic drivers, and accordingly, consumers will be eager for post-game analysis from all angles," he says. "There’s great value to reaching the significant audience that will visit Yahoo! Sports, which is still the #1 sports destination online, for that coverage."

    The example would appear to illustrate a useful tactic for capitalizing on physical world events by reaching those interested online in the places they are likely to go. It doesn’t have to be on the scale of the Super Bowl or have the reach of Yahoo Sports to be a potentially successful strategy.

  • Online Ad Revenue Hits Record High for Q1

    The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers have shared some new findings indicating that online ad revenues in the U.S. hit $5.9 billion for the first quarter of 2010. That’s the highest first-quarter revenue of all time.

    "The year-over-year growth we are seeing reflects marketers’ confidence in the value and effectiveness of interactive advertising," said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. "The Internet, together with explosive technological innovation in devices and platforms, has transformed consumers’ lives, giving them access to entertainment and information however, whenever, and wherever they want it. That’s why the vibrant interactive advertising and marketing industry lends major fuel to the U.S. economy."

    Q1 Sees Record for Internet advertising - IAB

    "We are seeing continued signs of an improved economy and interactive advertising market," said David Silverman, PwC Assurance partner. "The media industry —like the economy as a whole—saw tremendous challenges this past year, and uncertainty about the recovery remains.  However, entering 2010 with such strong Q1 revenues is a sign of the health and vitality of online media, and of marketers’ continuing investment in interactive as a cornerstone of their advertising campaigns."

    The record Q1 revenue comes after a record Q4, which saw $6.3 Billion in U.S. online ad revenue.

    As Facebook continues its conquest of the web, expect it to play a bigger role in online advertising. Recent comScore numbers found that Facebook served the greatest number of impressions for display ads in the first quarter.