Perhaps it isn’t a shock, but it’s still news. From BusinessWeek:
The radio industry won’t want to hear this. Advertising dollars are shifting online faster than analysts anticipated. In fact, advertisers will soon spend as much money on the Internet as they do on the airwaves, according to a newly released eMarketer study.
By 2007, online advertising will bring in 6.8% of the total and, by 2008, it will bring in 8.1%—putting it well over radio. By some estimates, online ad spending will overtake radio even sooner. Forrester Research anticipates online advertising will bring in $17.4 billion this year—that’s a billion more than eMarketer’s estimate and would be roughly 6.2% of the total, putting online advertising much closer to overtaking radio.
I still think radio is a good medium for local advertisers, who need mass audiences cheaply, but radio stations and their programmers need to take drastic steps to improve the programming so listeners will want to tune in. I don’t know if that’ll happen to any large degree.
