Advertisers Spend More Online Than In Print Newspaper This Year: First Time EVER

Oh trends and trends and more trends. Look at this, this is a trend which spells some sort of doom for print (if you believe advertisements to be the only thing holding print afloat.) Specifically newspapers (offline AND online), who, until this year, had been beating the entire rest of the internet for ad spending. That's changed in 2010 and it looks like it's never going to be the same. This is spelled out by eMarketer, a data center whose CEO Geoff Ramsey said thusly: "It's something we've seen coming for a long time, but this is a tipping point."

Ramsey went on to say "Marketers are devoting bigger shares of their budgets to digital media as they see more customers shifting time toward the Web." When combined, newspaper ad revenues from both their online and print publications will total $25.7 billion this year (2010), just short of what ad networks will be spending on the rest of the internet: $25.8 billion. Ramsey notes that trends show the shift to digital ads comes as tracking of such ads is much simpler and can basically be tied to a real and measurable mathematical financial result. Simple!

The same study shows that online display ads will beat paid search ads by 2014 (search ads still dominant today.) Between 2011 and 2014, eMarketer sees online display spending to grow faster than overall online spending, with search spending just a bit behind. The most massive growth though, surprisingly, is the gigantic rise in predicted online video advertising which is set to leap by a minimum of 34% each year through 2014. Wowie!

[Via MediaPost]