Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Spending on Internet advertising in the U.K. rose 62 percent to 490.8 million pounds ($861 million) in the first half and is now worth more than outdoor advertising, an industry group said.
The Internet had 5.8 percent of the U.K. advertising market in the first six months of 2005, more than outdoor media's 5.1 percent, the Internet Advertising Bureau said in an e-mailed release today, citing figures from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Outdoor media include billboards and ads on buses.
``At the end of 2004, the IAB predicted online would overtake outdoor by mid 2006 and we've beaten this target,'' the group's chief executive Guy Phillipson said in the statement. For the full year, online advertising is likely to exceed 1 billion pounds for the first time, he said.
Advertisers are spending more on the Web as usage of online technology increases, with faster connection speeds, and companies including Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. sell new types of ads on search engines and in videos. Still, the medium is much smaller than TV and press.
In the first quarter of 2005, about 44 percent of U.K. ad spending was in magazines and newspapers and 25 percent on television, according to the Advertising Association, another trade group. Internet advertising was about a fifth the size of TV. Overall, advertising increased 5.3 percent to 3.9 billion pounds, it said.
The Internet Advertising Bureau didn't provide comparisons with TV and press for the first half. Spending on online advertising is also greater than radio, which attracts 3.6 percent of the market, the London-based IAB said.
Online advertising in the U.S. rose 26 percent to $5.8 billion in the first half from the year-earlier period, the Interactive Advertising Bureau said last week in a similar report.
Sales at Google, the world's most popular search engine, almost doubled to $1.38 billion in the second quarter, the company said in July. The company makes about 35 percent of its revenue outside the U.S.
Yahoo's sales rose 51 percent to $1.25 billion in the second quarter.
Like New York-based News Corp., British media companies such as Daily Mail & General Trust Plc and Trinity Mirror Plc have been buying Internet units. Daily Mail bought Zambeasy Ltd., which owns jobs Web sites, in August and Trinity Mirror paid agreed to buy Hotgroup Plc, another recruitment site, last month.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. last week completed the purchase of Intermix Media Inc., which owns MySpace.com, as part of a plan to boost Internet sales to as much as $1 billion over the next five years.
