We've seen this coming for a long time, but here it is in official, press release form: Financial advertisers spent 27% less on display ads in the first half of 2008 than they did in 2007, Nielsen says. That drop helped push over all "imaged-based online advertising" down 6%.
As usual, there are caveats here: display/"image-based online advertising" is only a portion of the Web ad market. And Nielsen doesn't provide numbers on search ads, which are the biggest slice of the market. And as astute SAI reader Jake Hermes points out below, the Nielsen numbers are for CPM ads only, which means they're also missing a big slug of performance-based ads. So Nielsen isn't giving you a complete picture of what the steadily worsening financial crisis has done to Web ads overall. But you can still make a pretty good guess: It hasn't been good, and it's going to get worse.
See Also: Internet Recession Watch: No News Is Good News
What Mortgage Crisis? Financial Ads Keep Pouring Online
