UK Display Spend Up By 27.5% To £945 Million; Growth Fuelled By Rise In Facebook DR Spend

IAB UK released some numbers yesterday on the size of the advertising market in the UK. Online advertising is is now in excess of four billion, and estimates that one in four pounds is now being spent on digital. We are clearly in the right industry. These figures were broken out into different channels. Display, often seen as the industry laggard compared to search, saw a huge rise of 27.5% to £945 million. This is great news, right? It is - but the display number is a little distorted. Wrapped up in this display data is social media (read Facebook DR display spend), which makes it difficult to gauge how much the publisher number has actually moved. It would have been great if the IAB had separated out the "social media" and display figures - but then that would actually give the industry proper insight into what Facebook was actually doing in terms of UK revenue. The breakdown of the display spend can be seen below - but before including this in your sales deck know that somewhere buried in those figures is about £150 million of Facebook revenue.