The Interactive Advertising Bureau IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) today released the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report for the full year 2009. US Internet advertising revenues totaled $22.7 billion in 2009 -  a 3.4% decline from 2008. Despite this particular number,  there are signs of an emergent recovery in the industry. The fourth quarter of 2009 hit a record quarterly high of $6.3 billion – a 2.6% increase year-over-year and a 14% increase over the third quarter of 2009.

Interesting points in the report:

• Search revenues, comprising 47% of the total, amounted to nearly $10.7 billion for 2009, up slightly from 2008.
• Display-related advertising – which includes display ads, rich media, digital video and sponsorship – totaled nearly $8 billion in 2009, showing an increase of 4% from 2008.
• Digital video continues to grow rapidly, with an almost 39% increase from 2008 to 2009.
• Based on industry data from PwC from 2005 to 2009 in five key U.S. ad-supported media (television, radio, newspapers, consumers magazines and Internet), the internet’s share of combined ad revenue grew from 8% to 17%.

“The latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report makes clear that digital media are now a core component of successful advertising and marketing campaigns,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. “As consumers spend more of their time immersed in digital media, marketers are increasingly reaching them there – building brands online and making digital the central force in their cross-media strategies.”

A copy of the full report is available here.

Social Networking Trends 2009

According to comScore, social networking was one of the web’s top activities in 2009. Nearly 4 out of 5 Internet users visited a social networking site in December 2009. The activity now accounts for 11% of all time spent online in the U.S.,
making it one of the most engaging activities across the Web.

Facebook and Twitter Grow

Facebook and Twitter both posted triple-digit growth. Facebook surged to the #1 position among social networks for the first time in May 2009, and continued its strong growth trajectory throughout the year, finishing with 112 million visitors in December 2009 – up 105%  during the year.

Twitter finished the year with nearly 20 million visitors, a huge leap from just 2 million visitors in 2008. Much of Twitter’s extraordinary audience growth occurred during the first few months of 2009.

MySpace has experienced some softening in its audience; however, a new strategic focus on entertainment content is exhibiting signs of success with MySpace Music having grown 92% in the past year.

Facebook has also shown impressive growth in unique visitors, page views, and total time spent – all increased by a factor of two or more. As more people use Facebook more frequently, the site has grown to account for three times as much total time spent online as it did last year.

Demographics of Social Networks

MySpace’s user composition tilted toward younger users in 2009. Users age 24 and younger now comprising 44.4% of the site’s audience. Facebook’s audience was evenly split between those younger and older than 35 years of age.

The initial success of Twitter was largely driven by users in the 25-54 year old age segment, which made up 65%  of all visitors to the site in December 2008. This a different segmentation than the common one in social media networks, where usually the younger audience build the brand’s success. In 2009, with the help of celebrities and media coverage, younger users flooded to the site in large numbers, with those under age 18 (up 6.2 percentage points) and 18-24 year olds (up 7.9 percentage points) representing the fastest growing demographic segments.

Summary

It seems that social networks still need the younger audience in order to grow. Also, it’s clear that social networks can’t stand in one place, and have to keep developing new features and attractions, as the young audience gets bored easily.

Facebook is still the strongest network, by far, and at the moment there doesn’t seem to be a serious competitor for it.

According to comScore, social media marketers must be aware that social networks can deliver substantial reach for ad campaigns and despite low click-through rates there is measurable view-through value from these ads.

Yet again, the numbers that made the net in 2009. This time, it’s presented in one huge infographic.

Some interesting facts:

• People in the age group of 18-29 use the internet the most.
• Those with the highest level of income ($75K and upwards) have the fastest broadband.
• Norway, Finland and Sweden have the highest penetration of internet.
• 28% of bloggers are 35-44 years old.

According to a report by NPD group, U.S. retail operating systems boxed software revenue increased 35% in 2009. Other software creators weren’t so successful: overall non-games software revenue has dropped by 7% in 2009 to $2.4 billion.

Operating systems (such as Windows 7 and Snow Leopard) was the only category to post both a revenue and unit increase over 2008.  With new operating system releases from both Microsoft and Apple in the back half of the year sales traffic, volume, and interest in boxed software were at very high levels.  Both OS releases showed record sales.

MS Office Home and Student delivered strong sales volumes during both the back-to-school and holiday periods because of an aggressive price promotion. Apple’s iWork 2009 also saw strong unit volume growth as average prices declined more than 15% on the single-user version.

Just a reminder: if you don’t want to pay for your operating system, there are plenty of free alternatives out there, especially Linux-based.

For example: 90 trillion e-mails were sent during 2009 over the net; there are 234 million websites on the web as of December 2009; 126 million blogs and counting; YouTube serves 1 billion movies per day… And much more!

[ Read Internet 2009 in numbers ]