10/08/08

The report was released yesterday but it already seems out of touch with the reality on Wall Street. The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers released figures on ad spending for the first six months of 2008 and the results were positively glowing.

For H108, ad revenues reached $11.5 billion, a 15.2 percent increase over the nearly $10 billion during the same period last year. That was a gain of 26.6 percent over the first half of 2006.

Dig a little deeper and all is not rosy: Although Q2 grew 12.8 percent year-over-year, it showed a slight sequential decline of 0.3 percent from Q1.

Search ads did better than display. Revenue for search totaled almost $5.1 billion for the first six months of 2008. That’s a gain of 24 percent over last year’s $4.1 billion, although not as strong as last year when search ads were up 41 percent.

Display ads were strong though not quite as impressive: H108 saw revenue up to $3.8 billion from $3.2 billion in the same period in 2007, a 19 percent increase.

Performance based deals edged out CPM in 2008. The performance model grew 50 percent in the first half of 2008 while CPM deals’ growth declined slightly with 44 percent gains this year compared to a 45 percent increase the year.

What remains to be seen, of course, is how online advertising will fare in the second of half of 2008 when spending, due to the financials markets, is expected to be down.

The full report with graphs can be found here.