The UK’s fastest growing advertising medium, the internet, has finally overtaken direct mail this month by grabbing 15% of UK advertising revenues.

The figures, just released by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), show online advertising hitting a half-year record of £1.33 billion and overtaking the traditional direct mail medium which is losing market share.

Of this total, pay-per-click advertising, such as Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, scooped 57.1% of the market. This is hardly surprising at a time when 1.4 billion search queries are submitted each month and over 80% result in a click-through.

Online classified ads showed the largest growth though, up 72% on last years figures. This has come as a blow to the print industry as businesses move their budgets towards the often cheaper and more targeted online portals.

With 52% of UK adults now online at home and 90% of those on broadband, advertisers can now access a wide audience and feed them highly visual, creative content that could not have been achieved with dial-up. The ability to include sound, video and probably most importantly, direct links to their websites where often customers can buy there and then, is bound to be a huge draw. Add to this the accuracy of targeting customers through search engines such as Google and you may well wonder why anyone would place a print ad ever again!