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UK online ad market on track to beat radio
Should pass £500m mark this year

By Reuters

Published: Tuesday 12 October 2004

Britain's online advertising market hit £266.8m for the first half of 2004, putting the industry on track to surpass commercial radio in the next year, an industry trade group says.

A surge in demand for corporate-sponsored search listings helped push the online ad market up 76 per cent year-on-year.

The nascent market, decimated by the dot-com collapse of 2000, continues to show signs of strong growth as more Britons go online and the UK's larger advertising market recovers.

The Internet Advertising Bureau's UK unit said on Monday online ads would surpass the £500m mark this year. The forecast would put the industry well on track to beat its 2007 goal of more than £600m, at which point it would overtake commercial radio.

IAB UK Chief Executive Danny Meadows-Klue said: "All indications are we will overtake radio sooner than we thought."

According to a recent report by the Radio Advertising Bureau, commercial radio advertising grew by 4.4 per cent in the same period to reach nearly £298m.

In the past two years, the larger online advertising markets of the United States and Britain have rebounded significantly, boosted by the popularity of ad-sponsored search links found on search engines such as Google and Yahoo and favoured by advertisers of all sizes.

While up-to-date figures were not available for the rest of Western Europe, online advertising has been growing at a steady, albeit somewhat slower, clip in France and Germany too, the IAB has said.