An article in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday reports on the more sober forecasts for Internet advertising growth made by the Internet Advertising Bureau. There have been some predictions that the $1 billion online advertising market will grow between 50-60% over the next year, yet the IAB predict growth will be half that figure.

The IAB figures are based on reported trends up to the end of June 2007, using the data collated from advertisers by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Based on those figures, the IAB expects advertising spend by the end of 2007 to be around $1.3 billion and $1.4 billion and that PWC estimates an annual growth of around 25% per annum until 2011.

The main issue with the IAB's figures remains the they can only be a rough estimate since Google continues to withhold their actual data, which is seen as an estimated 80 per cent of the $399 million search advertising category.