KEY POINTS:
Finally some methodical, detailed research that looks at the growing local market for online advertising with the release today of a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The initial report only covers two quarters so isn't totally reliable in terms of identifying trends, but two things become clear on reading the whole report (.pdf).
The market ($57.6 million for the first half of the year) is bigger than initially thought and it's also not as well-developed as overseas markets.
That's borne out in the overall mix of advertising where online classifieds holds a disproportionately large share of the market (44 per cent) compared to in the US, Australia and the UK.
That's down to the dominance of APN News & Media and Fairfax and a sprinkling of other paid-for classifieds listers.
Online classifieds made up 48 per cent of the market in the first quarter, but had slipped to 44 per cent in the second quarter. Still, that compares to just 27 per cent in Australia, 20.8 per cent in the UK and 17 per cent in the US.
Display advertising and search and directory-based advertising, which Google has built its empire on, is on the rise, but off lower bases than in the rest of the world.
It seems that in these two categories there's plenty of room for innovation by local advertising companies as I don't think our web usage patterns are particularly different to those of the Brits, yanks and Aussies.
In particular, there doesn't seem to be much going on with New Zealand websites in terms of search-related advertising other than what's based around Google Adwords.
In display adverts the big spenders are banks, airlines, government departments and telcos. No surprises there. The research at least lets us benchmark the industry here against what is going on overseas and as such will prove useful for companies that are increasingly spending money on online advertising campaigns.
