Online Ad Spending Hits $4.8 Billion in Q4 2006
Online ad revenues continued to grow at a quick pace in Q4 2006, reaching nearly $4.8 billion, according to numbers released today by The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and its independent research partner PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Context & Ripple Effects
The quarterly cadence of the IAB/PwC survey has become the industry's scoreboard: in November 2006 the pair reported Q3 revenues had surpassed $4 billion, then the largest quarter ever recorded. The new figure of nearly $4.8 billion for Q4 means each quarter of 2006 set a fresh record over the last, with the survey run by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and independently compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The story travelled mainly through the trade press and the IAB's own release on March 8, 2007, with no public discussion posts recorded at the time — the numbers themselves were the news, arriving just ahead of full-year 2006 totals that would put the annual picture in perspective.
First-order effects
- Publishers and networks selling online inventory enter 2007 with pricing leverage from two consecutive record quarters, while buyers who budgeted against older media assumptions face higher costs for premium placements.
Second-order effects
- Traditional broadcast and print sellers competing for the same brand budgets must answer with audience measurement and cross-media packages, since the IAB/PwC series gives marketers a credible, audited benchmark to reallocate spend against.
Third-order effects
- If each quarter keeps setting a record, online advertising shifts from experimental line item to core media buy, pushing the industry toward standardized measurement and audited reporting — a role the IAB/PwC partnership is already institutionalizing.
The trend: Internet advertising is compounding quarter over quarter through 2006 into 2007, converting an emerging channel measured by a single IAB/PwC series into a mainstream share-of-budget contender.