Online advertising in Australia reached $1,871 million in 2009. Despite cutting of few advertising budgets, reported growth is healthy number of 9.4% comparing to 2008.

We are sure that 2010 will bring even more advertising dollars to online with special highlight on social media and custom solutions. Just recently we wrote about JetStar moving majority of budget to online activity. More companies will follow and growth more than 10% could be expected in this year. FastCompany predicted that next year overall growth of online advertising will be 9.6%, up to $119.6B. This prediction can be seen in their great infographic – follow the ad money.

Australia will pick up on few more revenue sources as online video advertising and with increasing use of online and consumer activity with expect over 10% year on year growth. Search, than display advertising and classifieds are still best performing in 2009. Finance, computers & communications and motoring will be the industries to watch. Mobile advertising is next thing to hit Australia and with arrival of 4G we hope to see real boom in this sector too.

We are big believers in mobile market and our entire online communities support mobile module. This mean that each community Soshima build can have mobile version and allow user to view and interact with content through their handsets. As Google recently announced that more people use online web than apps, we are focused on mobile web on the first place. But of course we offer apps for iPhone and Android too.

If we count mobile web and advertising dollars in online expenditure, question is – where will iPad spending be added – to online or print? We would say online, as iPad sue mobile and wi-fi, but I am sure that print publishers would like to add some number to their publications too. Conde Nest already got approval to add downloads of GQ app to their print circulation. Well, let’s see.

Information related to 2009 spend is taken from IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers report.