Britain's online advertising market hit £266.8 million sterling for the first half of 2004 to put the industry on track to surpass commercial radio in the next year, an industry trade group said today.
The Internet Advertising Bureau's (IAB) UK unit said online ads would surpass the £500 million mark this year. The forecast would put the industry well on track to beat its 2007 goal of more than £600 million, at which point it would overtake commercial radio.
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.
"All indications are we will overtake radio sooner than we thought," said IAB UK Chief Executive Mr Danny Meadows-Klue.
According to a recent report by Britain's Radio Advertising Bureau, commercial radio advertising grew by 4.4 per cent in the same period to reach nearly £298 million.
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, rate in France and Germany too, the IAB has said.