ChasNote

Double-digit growth has returned to global online ad spending. Full coverage at Adweek.

From Zack Rodgers’s summary of Razorfish’s annual digital spending report (see ClickZ):

–Display advertising within social media captured only 4% of budgets

–Investment in social-media marketing skewed toward content creation and management (eg, Facebook fan pages, blogger outreach) versus traditional advertising

–The big winners continued to be CPM campaigns or sponsorships negotiated at a site-specific level (30%) and paid search / sponsored listings (25%)

–Mobile advertising dollars remain small, but the future looks bright

–CPC rates at major search engines was between $0.56 and $0.88 per click, expected to rise in 2010

From NYT’s Dealbook blog:

“While Twitter has nearly equaled Facebook in awareness among Americans — 87 percent now know of it, compared with 26 percent last year — it still lags behind in use, Teddy Wayne writes in The New York Times.”

Twitter usage is still way, way behind that of Facebook but it’s enormous awareness will keep Facebook on its toes, especially when you look at this other data point from the Edison Research study:

“[Twitter] users are more than three times as likely to follow brands and companies on Twitter as other users of social networks do, with over 40 percent using Twitter to learn about and provide opinions on brands.”

Turns out he actually listens to soft rock.

Now that radio measurement firm Arbitron has replaced its self-reported paper diaries with Portable People Meters that actually track listening behavior (as Nielsen did for TV ratings in 1987), it’s finding that we listen to the embarrassing stuff more often than we’d like to admit. Ratings for classical stations are nearly 11% lower than previously reported, and men make up 16% more of the soft-rock audience than they did when they had to acknowledge it in writing. More at NY Times.

Eleven percent here, 16% there — it adds up to a big gap between what we do and what we tell pollster we do.

Newspapers have lost 7 million subscribers in the past 25 years, while online newspapers have picked up 30 million readers in the past five. See? The Internet’s not all bad! (Though you might argue that email’s mostly bad, since 90% of emails sent each day are spam.)

(Thanks, @emilyquestions!)

From a summary of a recent PostRank study published at Read/Write Web:

“The big picture is that total engagement with online content is growing while on-site engagement is declining in significance as off-site engagement like link sharing on social networks grows.”

In other words, more people are doing something with the content they read (commenting, sharing, voting), but they’re doing it on the large social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Digg rather than in the comments fields on the sites where the content originates.

August 2009 Comscore data for unique US visitors to “social networking” sites. Graphic from USA Today. ???? ?????

We’re now spending 17% of our online time with social networking sites, up from 6% last August. From Read/Write Web:

“According to new figures from Nielsen, the amount of time spent surfing social networking and blogging sites had tripled since last year, suggesting ‘a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used,’ says Jon Gibs, VP of media and agency insights at the company’s online division….”

As a result:

“Even as companies decreased their overall ad expenditures, they increased their spend on top social networks and blogs — up 119% from last year. ($108 million in August 2009 up from $49 million in August 2008). And when broken down by category, the increases are even more dramatic. The entertainment industry, for example, has increased spending by 812% year-over-year on social network sites and the travel industry increased spending by 364%.”

(Thanks, Dave!)

That’s according to Adify sales data assembled as a Chart of the Day at SAI. No surprises in the composition of the top 3. It’s interesting, though, to see the categories that are experiencing a post-recession bounce: tech, food and real estate.