CMO

Report: online advertising growth slowing but still growing

All online advertising categories showed growth throughout the year, but the individual categories had very different results finds IAB Australia 2019 report

The growth in the Australian online advertising market has slowed, but still achieved 5.6 per cent year-on-year expansion to reach $9.3 billion expenditure for the 2019 calendar year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Australia Online Advertising Expenditure report.  

IAB Australia CEO, Gai Le Roy, said the slowing of digital ad growth in 2019 came as no surprise to the industry.

“The whole market has seen media investments under pressure and the growth rate under half of what the market experienced 2018,” she said.

All online advertising categories showed growth throughout the year, but the individual categories - search, classifieds and display - had very different results. Video advertising was again the growth driver in the general display category with 19.9 per cent growth year-on-year. 

“We have seen a further shift in video inventory dominating the overall general display category and standard display formats contracting by 16 per cent. It was encouraging to see the travel advertiser category gain share following investment and development of travel content by a number of publishers.” said Le Roy.

For the full calendar year 2019, the general display advertising category maintained steady segment share and growth of 5.1 per cent to reach $3.5 billion, while classifieds grew just 1.7 per cent to reach $1.7 billion spend in 2019.

Meanwhile, search and directories growth slowed year-on-year to 7.7 per cent to reach $4.2 billion for 2019, although the category still outperformed the market overall.

In other results, the report found almost half of content publishers’ general display inventory was bought via media agencies using either an insertion order or another non-programmatic method. Of the balance, 29 per cent of general display advertising was bought programmatically with fixed CPM and 8 per cent via guaranteed inventory (9 per cent), while 17 per cent of all display advertising was bought directly from advertisers.

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