Netting profits

Online advertising expenditures reached zł.743 million last year, amounting to 8.7 percent of total advertising in Poland. That figure is still low in comparison to online ad sales in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, according to the Internet Advertising Expenditure Report 2007 published by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) last week.

Online advertising in those countries amounted to around 15 percent. Compared to the global average of 8.1 percent, however, the Polish market is still somewhat ahead of the game. In terms of value, the online ad market also overtook the radio advertising market for the first time last year. "The online advertising market is mature," PwC expert, Paweł Ożarowski said.

The main sectors advertising online last year were media and entertainment (a 14.3-percent share), telecoms (13.7 percent) and financial services (11.3 percent). Display ads had the biggest share of the online pie in Poland (42.4 percent), followed by Yellow Pages ads (21.3 percent) and search engine marketing (19.7 percent).

The share of the latter is expected to rise since experts consider it the driving force behind online advertising growth.

The value of the online advertising market could account for 10.2 percent of total ad expenditures by the end of this year, noted Piotr Kowalczyk of IAB. The market is expected to continue growing over the next few years. According to IAB analysts, growth will be driven by a number of factors, including the increasing number of web users and the fact that more businesses are logging on. Internet users will become a more attractive target for advertisers as teenagers and college students enter the labor market.

The number of internet users in Poland was estimated at 14.1 million (36.6 percent of the population) in December, whereas the highest internet penetration was in Norway (88 percent), and the EU average reached 55.7 percent, according to InternetWorldStats.com.