How big is the contextual ad market? I’ve turned to a few sources, made a few assumptions, and came up with the following numbers:

First, we begin with eMarketer’s projections from February 2009, which are admittedly a bit rosy. (Keep in mind that we’re generally optimistic with respect to contextual advertising as well, even during the current rough patch) These figures are for the U.S. only:

2008: $2.15 billion
2009: $2.45 billion (+14% over previous year)
2010: $2.73 billion (+11%)
2011: $2.98 billion (+9%)
2012: $3.33 billion (+12%)

This works out so that contextual advertising comprises about 20% of the search advertising market, and about 9% of the total online advertising market overall.

Worldwide figures are not available, so I’ve taken estimates of the total online advertising and search advertising markets from IDC’s 2008 study and applied the same percentages for contextual advertising’s share, as well as the same growth rate for contextual advertising. This yields the following for the total worldwide market (I’ve taken off a significant figure from eMarketer’s U.S. projections):

2008: $5.9 billion
2009: $6.5 billion
2010: $7.3 billion
2011: $8.0 billion
2012: $8.9 billion

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.