Web advertising resumes rapid growth

Good news for Internet content as online advertising grew 15% to $26 billion in 2010

Online Advertising got back on track in 2010, showing 15% growth to $26 billion. The industry shot past newspapers to become the second largest ad medium, behind only television. Of equal significance is the fact that display advertising grew as a percentage of online, taking share from search, which remains the largest form of digital advertising, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau.

The news is good for Digital Publishers. It appears 2009, the first down year in advertising for the industry, was a recession-driven outlier, and the 2010 growth brought the industry back to where it would have been had there been no recession. The largest categories of advertisers remain Retail, Telcom, Financial Services and Auto.

Not surprisingly, performance based advertising grew as a share of overall, with cpm-based pricing dropping from 37% to 33% of all advertising. Internet advertisers continue to gravitate toward measurable success.

(For more from Larry, visit his blog. To purchase his book C-Scape, click here.)