Two separate reports released this week appear to indicate that the U.S. online advertising business is experiencing some degree of growth. According to ComScore the total number of impressions for U.S. online display advertising reached 1.1 trillion in Q1 of 2010 which is a 15% increase on Q1 2009. The ComScore report says that the average price per 1,000 impressions was around $2,48 with a total spending of $2.7bn for the first quarter of 2010.
Separately PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Internet Advertising Bureau says that internet advertising expenditure for Q1 2010 reached $5.9bn, an increase of 7.5% over Q1 2009. According to the joint report the figure for Q1 2010 is a record for the first quarter. However, the number for Q1 2010 is much lower than that for Q4 2009 which was at $6.3bn.
The apparently conflicting numbers do align in one respect – online advertising expenditure is on the way up, if not by much. The drop in expenditure during the worst of the recession seems to have stopped as companies again extend their marketing budgets.
Some interesting statistics were included in the reports. For one, ComScore claims that their latest figures show that Facebook was ahead of Yahoo in terms of banner ad impressions, displaying more banner ads to its users than Yahoo. Facebook had a gigantic 176 billion ad impressions, 16.2% of the market, as opposed to Yahoo with 132 billion impressions… a mere 12.1% of the market. Clearly, the ability to keep users on your website for extended periods has unavoidable benefits.
