ChasNote

From the IAB’s report on US ad spending for 2012. Digital ad spending is up 15% over 2011, with retailers (20%) and financial services (13%) representing the biggest spending sectors.

It’s interesting, though, to imagine this chart (as I’ve hacked together, above) if you remove one company from it, Google. When you subtract out international revenue and the former Motorola business (see Marketing Land), and you multiply the difference by 96% (the share of Google’s revenues that come from advertising), Google’s US ad revenues for 2012 were nearly $19 billion. Pulling Google out of the mix, US advertisers spent less than $18 billion on internet advertising last year — somewhere between newspapers and radio.

According to a recent survey of 5,800 mainstream US TV viewers, 93% of people are watching more TV than they were last year. A lot of that growth, however, is coming from TV-watching on the Internet (more than half are viewing some TV online, 15% are watching more than 6 hours per week online) and time-shifted viewership by way of DVRs, which increased for 71% of survey respondents. Among those using DVRs, 96% are skipping the commercials. Ninety-six percent!

The topic of commercial-skipping gave birth to one of my all-time favorite headlines, from Outside the Beltway last year: “86% Skip Commercials (14% Can’t Find Remote).” The good news is, I guess, that 10% of people have cleaned up their living rooms, gotten themselves organized, and now they can locate their remote controls.

“Ten percent of all the photos we have were taken in the past 12 months,” says Jonathan Good on the blog for 1000memories, a photo organizing and sharing site.

Digital cameras are now ubiquitous — it is estimated that 2.5 billion people in the world today have a digital camera[6]. If the average person snaps 150 photos this year that would be a staggering 375 billion photos. That might sound implausible but this year people will upload over 70 billion photos to Facebook, suggesting around 20% of all photos this year will end up there[7]. Already Facebook’s photo collection has a staggering 140 billion photos, that’s over 10,000 times larger than the Library of Congress…. In total we have now taken over 3.5 trillion photos.

Facebook’s 140 billion photos is 4% of the 3.5 trillion photos every taken by humans. In ten years, that number will be one in five (at least).

Kantar Media’s report on US ad spending for the first half of 2011 (full infographic) shows the Q2 year-over-year investment up 2.8% over 2010, slower growth than in Q1, which was up 4.4% over last year. TV is still the biggest piece of the ad-spending pie, but growth is coming from national syndication (up 18.5%) and cable (up 11.8%), not the big networks (down 7.6%). Internet advertising added up to nearly $12 billion in the first half, with 57% coming from paid search. The five biggest spenders: Progressive, Verizon, Experian, GM and AT&T.

From Wall Street Journal’s article AOL Growth Comes At A Cost, which says “[AOL] isn’t earning enough money selling ads on those sites to cover its costs for a profitable business, analysts say.”

In the early days of Federated Media, we started new-prospect meetings with a chart that showed one line going up and to the right (“Internet usage is growing”) and another line going up more steeply (“usage of conversational media such as blogs and social networking sites is growing faster”).

Time to update that chart! The latest numbers from Comscore (the same source we used back in 2006) show that without Facebook, the Internet is actually shrinking.

More at Business Insider.

eMarketer predicts US marketers will spend $12.33 billion in online display advertising (including online video, banner ads, rich media and sponsorships) versus the $14.38 billion they’ll spend on search advertising. By 2015, display spending will surpass search.

“The rise of display advertising, in particular online video, goes hand in hand with a rise in usage of digital advertising for branding. Online advertising, long considered primarily for direct response, still leans in that direction. But branding is increasing in importance as better ad vehicles develop for this purpose and market dollars flow.”

More at eMarketer.

Amazon: $35.1 million
AT&T: $34.6 million
State Farm: $28.7 million
Capital One: $28.1 million
Expedia: $24.3 million
Progressive Insurance: $22.9 million
Geico: $20.9 million
Chase: $20.8 million
Verizon: $18.8 million
Scottrade: $17.5 million

Those 10 alone spent $252 million with Google in Q1, up 57.5% from Q1 of last year according to Kantar Media. More at Mediapost, including an emerging marketing arms race among the online travel sites.

Full story at eMarketer.

From a recent Pew report, Americans Spending More Time Following the News. The report’s title captures two things at once. One, time spent reading news is not falling; in fact it’s up from 2000. Two, it suggests the old model (subscribing, bookmarking) is being replaced by a new paradigm (following, friending).