Internet advertising ‘up by 10% in 2009′

Internet advertising will grow by 10.1 per cent across the world this year, the latest figures suggest.

However, global advertising as a whole will fall by 8.5 per cent as companies around the world attempt to cut costs, according to research from ZenithOptimedia.

The agency had previously released a forecast which suggested that this year’s decline would be 6.9 per cent.

Explaining the new figures, the company said: “Faced with extreme uncertainty, advertisers in most sectors planned for the worst and cut their costs in anticipation of steep drops in revenue.”

However, ZenithOptimedia’s data appears to paint a more positive picture for the global advertising sector going into next year, as it expects the beginnings of a recovery to emerge.

A separate study recently revealed that online and cinema were the only two advertising mediums to experience growth last year.

The internet gained by 19.1 per cent and cinema advertising by one per cent, according to the Advertising Association’s Advertising Statistics Yearbook 2009.