A new forecast from GroupM predicts that the UK will be the first major economy where advertisers spend more online than on TV ads.
According to the GroupM forecast, UK internet adspend will overtake TV adspend in 2009. In addition, the media planner and buyer said that Sweden will this year become the first country in which advertisers spend more online than on TV.
Online is forecast to make up 24% of UK media spend by the end of this year, with TV accounting for 26%.
GroupM said that it expects UK internet revenue to grow by 30.8% this year, reaching £3.4 billion, while TV will grow by 1% to around £3 .56 billion.
Adam Smith, futures director at GroupM said: “The UK is a special case. Its TV share is depressed by the BBC and there is still a large and healthy print sector and Britons are among the world’s heaviest internet users.”
“The internet is not one medium, its growth rate is a blend of three distinct businesses growing at different speeds: search, display and classified.”
Search spending is predicted to account for a 65% share of all internet ad revenue in 2008, up from 63% in 2007.
Smith added: “The growth of search is not a threat to established media. It is the growth of online display advertising, although small, that is a threat with money coming from areas such as newspaper ad revenue and maybe some TV spend.”
In December, Forrester Research published a forecast predicting that household broadband penetration will reach 71% by the end of 2013 (see Potential For Growth In European Broadband Adoption).
By then, any remaining dial-up services will be marginalised, said Forrester, with 98% of online access via broadband.
Media regulator Ofcom also published research in December, revealing that advertisers in the UK spend more money per person on internet advertising than any other country, at £33.
The second annual International Communications Market Report said that this is twice as much as France, Germany and Italy combined (see UK Advertisers Spend More Per Person Online Than Any Other Country).
At 14% of total revenues, spend in the UK on online advertising overtook magazine advertising for the first time and was more than the total spend on outdoor, cinema and radio advertising.
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