The Digital Landscape Report for January 2012 has revealed some interesting finds particularly about the world of online advertising. Global ad growth in general for 2012 is expected to be at 5.4%, which is down from 6.3% predicted in August, however, online ad spending is expected to record it’s strongest increase in 2012.
Bad news for print advertising again as this year, in the US online ad spending will exceed the total spent on print magazines and newspapers for the first time this year, that’s a total spend of $39.5 billion vs. $33.8 billion. However Interestingly in the UK you will now find it cheaper to advertise on Facebook, the average CPC of Facebook ads dropped 11% in the UK between the Q3 & Q4 2011. We can’t help wonder is this due to a decrease in the numbers of people advertising on Facebook?
In terms of social network in general however it seems the UK is leading the way, with the highest penetration of social networking users now based in the UK, 61% of all smartphone owners are ccessing social networks or blogs (Comscore Oct ‘11). In terms of the the EU, EU mobile social networking users have grown 46% in the past year, this is to reach 57.4m users (Oct ‘11 ). While Facebook has seen a slight decline (Facebook's share of total visits to social networks in December dropped from 58.5% in 2010 to 51.3% in 2011). However video seems to be on the up - YouTube, has grown from 23.6% of total visits to 25% (Hitwise Jan ‘12).
