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Comment by chaz | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that this ~$40B is just for broadcast TV ads. This excludes cable TV ads (~$30B) and subscription TV fees (~$80B). There is an ongoing non-zero sum shift in attention and dollars to online, but TV is far from dead.

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Yeah, that's the typical IAB's reality distortion field. Television is still almost 2:1 versus Digital advertising, and yet they worded the press release in such a way that convinced all the headline-skimmers that digital is bigger than TV in the US.

Funny that they lumped together very different digital channels (search, display, mobile), and yet decided to keep TV Broadcast and Cable TV as separate line items. That's intentionally misleading at best.

(disclaimer: I work in the area, and have a vested interest in the growth of digital ad revenue. But I still feel offended by these pseudo-researches)

This is a very important point. It's also necessary to recall that cable TV, broadcast TV, and subscription TV mostly gets its revenue from US-based consumers. In contrast, US-based advertising gets its revenue from consumers all around the world (though many of them are from the US). Just in terms of capturing the American market: internet advertising still has a long way to go.

great points. this spurred a google search to find the breakdown of internet advertising by country and respective growth rates (was curious where online ads are growing fastest and exactly how much the US accounted for), which yielded this interesting nugget if you trust eMarketer: norway leads the world in digital ad spend per person at $209. the US is second with $201/person. australia is third.

http://mashable.com/2013/09/25/digital-ads/

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