Online ad spending increases

Online ad spending closed in on $5 billion for the first time. This year itself ad spending increased by 26% from last year's $3.8 billion to reach $4.9 billion. In a report by The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, ad spending is likely to carry on its upward spending trend as marketers are getting more comfortable with the concept of interactive advertising.

Paid search is "currently the key driver of U.S. online advertising as a whole," and in turn Google dominates that sector because it attracts more users and monetizes each user's clicks better than its rivals, eMarketer Senior Analyst David Hallerman told the E-Commerce Times. eMarketer recently estimated that more than 40 percent of total Internet ad spending is tied to search marketing.