Australia’s digital advertising market reached $2.381 billion in the September quarter, growing 3 per cent quarter-on-quarter and 6.5 per cent year-on-year, according to the latest IAB Online Advertising Expenditure Report.
The report, prepared by PwC, is recognised as the industry standard for independent market-level industry intelligence in Australia.
The report found that the three advertising categories – general display, classifieds, and search and directories – all recorded year-on-year growth, broadly maintaining their respective share of market spend.
Within general display, the travel sector is now within the top three industries, almost doubling its share of spend to 8.2 per cent of the total general display market for the quarter. Automotive remains the top spending advertising category representing 22 per cent of display revenue for content sites.
Video was the main driver within general display advertising, growing steadily through the September quarter to reach $413 million and 48 per cent of the total display spend, fueled by the retail, FMCG and technology sectors.
Connected TV is now the dominant device for video inventory expenditure, increasing to 38 per cent from 31 per cent for the September quarter, while desktop (34 per cent) and mobile (28 per cent) expenditure both slightly decreased.
Programmatic trading continued to increase, with content publishers reporting that 36 per cent of all general display advertising inventory was sold programmatically in the September quarter.
By contrast, agency direct buys, via insertion order, which is the dominant buying method for general display advertising, reduced to 47 per cent of inventory. Within video inventory, some 49 per cent was bought programmatically versus 46 per cent via agency buys.
The report compiled by PwC, solely for the use of the IAB, presents an unaudited aggregation of data provided by members of the IAB as well as estimates developed from publicly available information and other sources.
IAB Australia is the peak trade association for online advertising in Australia.
