The latest quarterly figures for online advertising spend in Australia have been released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, using data collected by Pricewaterhouse-Coopers. These show that online display advertising has lost further market share in this sector to classified and search advertising, although the sector as a whole continues to show good growth.

The figures just published for the quarter to March show that the total online advertising market grew by over 30% on the same period last year, up $90.5m to $384.5m. Display advertising's share of this spend fell from 25.5% to 24.6% year-on-year, whereas classifieds grew from 27% to 27.7% and search rose from 47.4% to 47.7% - although this latter sector is still dominated by Google who refuse to reveal actual figures, so this data is based on PwC's estimate.

However, the change in sector share between the March quarter and the previous quarter to the end of December shows that display advertising lost 3 share points while classifieds rose 1.8 points and search by 1.2 share points. This may be indicating the start of a slowdown in online advertising due to possible concerns in an economic slowdown, although overall the market is still growing at a much healthier rate than any other advertising sector.