A new report from media analyst Screen Digest predicts that online advertising will fall 5% in 2009.
Screen Digest’s 2009 report, based on the US IAB’s recently released full year report for 2008, said that while internet advertising grew 10% in 2008, the fourth quarter was almost flat at +2.6%, a significant change from the first nine months of the year which were up approximately 15%.
It now predicts that all categories and sub-categories except video will decline in 2009. Banner advertising (-8.8 per cent) will not be fully compensated by the double digit growth of online video, so that the display category will be down 3.6%, it said.
Search is predicted to shrink by 2% and non-display categories such as classifieds will experience double digit falls. Overall, the total internet advertising market will shrink by 4.8% in 2009 and only stabilise in 2010, said Screen Digest.
Vincent Letang, senior analyst at Screen Digest, said: “Looking at the US results from the fourth quarter last year, it’s very clear that online display will fall this year despite the growth of video.
“Search was still growing in Q4 but the growth rate has slowed down so much that we now believe the next quarter will be in the red too – and online Classifieds will continue to fall. Our full year forecast for total internet advertising is thus down around 5%.
“Display and search, being huge and mature media, cannot be immune from the ongoing ad slump even though they will continue to outperform most other media during the period. We indeed anticipate the total US ad market to go down two digits in 2009 while some media (press, local TV) could be down by up to 20%.”
In March, IDC forecast that US online adspend in the first-quarter of 2009 would see a year on year fall for the first time since 2001 (see US online ad spending forecast to fall in Q1 2009).
At the start of April, meanwhile, a report from the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed that UK online adspend grew 17.1% in 2008, to £3.4 billion (see 63% of drivers expect a new car to come with DAB radio).
