Advertising online has been growing with a significant pace for years and is accelerating across the globe. This is a positive indicator for economic outlooks as agencies and businesses are spending money to reach their customers. Secondly, this is a positive indicator for the health of online marketing and advertising on the platform. Many top tier SEO firms also engage in paid search management and coordinate their offerings together in order to bring the greatest return for customers. As a result, growth figures of current and predictive levels of spending are valuable pieces of information.

Looking at the numbers, the total amount of online ad spend worldwide for this year will be $107.33 billion which represents 20% of total ad spending, including all its forms, across the globe. The rate of growth is increasing globally, but it is predicted that it will slow to nearly half that growth rate in 2016. All these latest figures come from recent reports from eMarketer.

During the time of this latest growth, the landscape has looked much the same. The US has been the clear leader in overall spend with a leading number of interview users, searchers, amount of consumer power, and overall paying eyeballs. But, this landscape is all about to change with the progression of emergent economies and internet markets. China will surpass the UK by 2014 and become the second-largest market for online ad spend globally after the US. China hit $11.78 billion by 2014 and the UK will be slightly lower at $11.25 billion.

As cited from Internet Retailer, those facilitating the research from eMarketer indicate that the main reason for this growth in China is simply the growing middle class there with increasing resources to spend on products and services. This is no small point when you consider the number of online users in China is roughly 500 million, as compared to the 314 million in the US.

Spending Elsewhere
Looking around to other regions and additional emerging markets, Brazil’s continuous rise will top the Latin American region. Next year, Brazil is expected to have $2.45 billion in spending and $4.43 across the region, which will then explode to $4.13 and $7.68, respectively, by 2016. We have touched on the Latin American market several times on this blog (with a mobile post, and a SEO post) and it remains a very relevant and growing collection of emerging markets.

From Latin America to the Asia-Pacific, this latter region will surpass Western Europe to become 2^nd in terms of regional ad spending by 2013. Led by China, the Asia-Pacific will see $33.57 billion in ad spend in 2013 compared to Western Europe at $31.17 billion. At that point, the North American market will see just over $50 billion and the US makes up over $46 billion of that.

Takeaway
The US and North America is still very much in the driver’s seat in terms of total ad spend, but the emerging consumers on developing markets will push ad spend up for the years to come as they continue to develop. This makes for increased opportunity for all-things-web regarding SEO, local search, paid search, social media marketing, and especially mobile, considering the popularity and meteoric rise of smartphones in those countries. Those looking to expand internationally should evaluate these markets and see the level of opportunity, which has the chance to be quite large.