US Internet ad revenue surpasses broadcast | Hacker News Reader

US Internet ad revenue surpasses broadcast

sfgate.com

91 pointsjamesbritt16 comments

It's worth noting that this ~$40B is just for broadcast TV ads. This excludes cable TV ads (~$30B) and subscription TV fees (~$80B). There is an ongoing non-zero sum shift in attention and dollars to online, but TV is far from dead.

This is a very important point. It's also necessary to recall that cable TV, broadcast TV, and subscription TV mostly gets its revenue from US-based consumers. In contrast, US-based advertising gets its revenue from consumers all around the world (though many of them are from the US). Just in terms of capturing the American market: internet advertising still has a long way to go.

great points. this spurred a google search to find the breakdown of internet advertising by country and respective growth rates (was curious where online ads are growing fastest and exactly how much the US accounted for), which yielded this interesting nugget if you trust eMarketer: norway leads the world in digital ad spend per person at $209. the US is second with $201/person. australia is third.

http://mashable.com/2013/09/25/digital-ads/

Yeah, that's the typical IAB's reality distortion field. Television is still almost 2:1 versus Digital advertising, and yet they worded the press release in such a way that convinced all the headline-skimmers that digital is bigger than TV in the US.

Funny that they lumped together very different digital channels (search, display, mobile), and yet decided to keep TV Broadcast and Cable TV as separate line items. That's intentionally misleading at best.

(disclaimer: I work in the area, and have a vested interest in the growth of digital ad revenue. But I still feel offended by these pseudo-researches)

Anyone knows how long it took for radio to surpass print? (If it ever did) And for TV yo surpass radio/print?

I think that less than 20 years (since the Internet went mainstream) It's an amazing feat. And this is even more surprising if we take into account that the Internet penetration rate in the US is around 80% [1] while TV's is almost a 100% [2].

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_o... [2] www.tvb.org/media/file/TV_Basics.pdf

As someone who doesn't directly consume broadcast media (radio or television), I kinda thought this was already the case. I and most everyone I know uses online services so much more than broadcast that I just assumed.

Guess I learned a bit more about how I shouldn't assume.

Direct link to 2013 report: http://www.iab.net/media/file/IAB_Internet_Advertising_Reven...

This is a pretty significant milestone. Wonder how it will affect the production and selection of television shows.

My grandfather once told me "only idiots and insurance agents make predictions." That said, this is exactly why I believe the Comcast-Time Warner merger is going to go through. The money in online spending is too great for it not to eventually do what happens to all rent-seeking enterprises, and have be consolidated into ever fewer hands.

They'll eventually say: "Hey wait a minute - all of those ads appearing on our Internet - we should get a cut of that!"

Auto adblock at the ISP level

Just a small fee to disable it for your ad..

Isn't US online advertising already consolidated into very few hands?

eg Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon

Maybe it was inevitable for many, but for those of us born well before the mass adoption of the Internet, this feels historic.

Anyone else have an "always knew it would happen, never thought it would happen" attitude toward this happening?

Don't you mean "kinda surprised it hadn't already happened"?

Does anyone know about total ,erm, volume? I guess numbers of impressions is what I'm thinking of?

If ads are online (please correct me if I'm wrong) are cheaper than broadcast ads for an impression, then while the revenues go up the profit might go down?

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