Bull or bear, e-commerce is on the up and up and up. From just the ad spending to the total spend, money spent online is growing exponentially as broadband access becomes cheaper and more available.
Credit Suisse estimates that consumers, businesses, and advertisers will be spending $263 billion by 2010, close to $100 billion more than last year.
Not to insult your math intelligence, but that’s over a quarter-trillion dollars.
All that money is being pumped into or via over 2 trillion Web pages, at least in March 2007, a growth of 9% over February, from 763 million active Internet users (though some estimates say it’s closer to a billion – but why count zeros when one can barely fathom those multitudes to begin with?).
Again, to emphasize the numbers and not to insult you, according to Credit Suisse, the trillions of web pages are growing at nearly 10% per month. It’s a good thing we invented exponents – that’d be a lot of zeroes to count on your calculator screen.
That’s just in pages, though. The overall spend is projected to grow at a clip of 13% between 2005 and 2010 (didn’t the telcos say something about incentive to invest?).
As access speeds get faster, expect more money to flow into the system.
Global Internet access doubled between 2001 and 2006 to 34% penetration.
That’s expected to hit 47% by 2010, and advertisers will be spending over $50 billion to that audience.
To put that better in perspective, US advertisers spent $150 billion on all media in 2006, but the Web – in total spend – only brought in $170 billion.
As media converges (there will come a day when there is little or no division between print, television, radio, and Web), imagine what these numbers will look like in 2020.
Growing at the current annual rate of 25%, if my math is right, we may see a trillion-dollar media market and give “the Roaring 20’s” a whole new meaning.
