US online adspend fell by 10% year on year in the first half of 2001, according to figures released today by CMRi, the internet division of advertising and marketing communications group, CMR.
CMRi estimates that US internet adspend for H1 2001 totalled $1.5 billion. Yahoo continued to drive overall website revenues with a total of $197.3 million in the first half of 2001. Among all parent companies, General Motors led online adspend with $25.4 million for the first half. Closely matching GMs expenditure and aggressive push in advertising is Ebay with a $24.4 million spend.
“Although we saw a gradual increase for online spending in the last quarter of 2000, the economic environment did not exclude this medium from the drastic hit we’ve seen across the entire marketplace throughout the course of 2001,” said David Peeler, president and CEO of CMR.
“As budget planning for 2002 gets under way, companies still recovering from their losses will be reluctant to channel their dollars towards major ad campaigns. With this mindset, we do not expect a jump-start in spending to kick in by first quarter 2002, as many have hoped,” he added.
| Top Online Ad Spending By Industry Class, H1 2001 |
| |
|
| Retail |
$299,404,537 |
| Media & advertising |
$261,440,066 |
| Financial |
$177,879,435 |
| Computer & software |
$149,753,786 |
| Local services & amusements |
$143,964,572 |
| Public transportation, hotels & resorts |
$68,016,488 |
| Automotive, automotive access & equipment |
$66,261,445 |
| Telecommunications |
$42,318,614 |
| Government & organisations |
$39,589,868 |
| Insurance & real estate |
$38,961,553 |
| |
|
| Source: CMRi’s AdNetTrackUS, September 2001 |
|
| Top Online Revenue By Website, H1 2001 |
| |
|
| Yahoo |
$197,282,923 |
| AOL.com |
$174,263,850 |
| Excite |
$90,453,160 |
| Lycos |
$61,892,893 |
| AltaVista |
$50,577,473 |
| Netscape |
$48,007,442 |
| Webcrawler |
$38,903,498 |
| ESPN.com |
$23,677,857 |
| Go.com |
$23,625,735 |
| Weather.com |
$20,084,731 |
| |
|
| Source: CMRiÂÂ’s AdNetTrackUS, September 2001 |
|
Comment As CMRi points out online, internet advertising growth has not been immune to the wider economic and advertising retraction that is currently being felt. A decline in adspend growth, whilst not really remarkable for most traditional media at present, is significant for the internet sector which had previously being growing faster than any other media in history in terms of revenue – more than 160% per year at one point.
Meanwhile, in the UK, recent data from Allegra Strategies claims that whilst the difficult market will mean a downturn this year, the average rate of growth for the next few years for new media ad revenues will be 51.8% per annum, expanding the sector’s share of total UK revenue to 6.7%, or £1.3 billion by 2005 (see Forecasts).
Zenith Media and Myers Reports are both predicting a 10% rise in global internet revenue for the full year – the only medium to show growth bar a 1.0% growth forecast for outdoor from Myers (see Forecasts).
