OVERVIEW
The number of people worldwide accessing the Internet to read breaking news, conduct library research, make consumer e-commerce transactions, use web-based business applications, and perform other online tasks had grown at an astronomic rate since the 1994 introduction of the Netscape Navigator browser. The number of Internet users worldwide had increased from about 360 million in 2000 to nearly 1.5 billion in 2008. North America had the world’s highest Internet penetration rate with 73.6 percent of North America’s population having Internet access. About 220 million of the 248 million Internet users in North America resided in the United States. Even though only 15.3 percent of Asians had Internet access in 2008, Asia’s 578.5 million Internet users made it the world’s largest and fastest growing geographic region for Internet usage.
The growth in the number of Internet users worldwide and in the United States had caused a shift in how advertisers communicated with consumers and had allowed Internet advertising to become the second most common form of advertising used in the United States in 2007. Only newspaper, with 2007 advertising revenues of $48.6 billion, controlled a larger share of United States advertising dollars. Cable television, radio, and network television each accounted for about $20 billion each in advertising revenues during 2007. The prospects for Internet advertisers looked strong in 2008 with Internet advertising expected to grow from $21 billion in 2007 to $36.5 billion in 2011. Search-based ads accounted for the largest portion of Internet advertisements in the United States during 2007—amounting to nearly $9 billion in industry revenues. Video ads shown on YouTube and other web sites accounted for only $505 million in 2007, but were expected to grow to a $5.8 billion market by 2013. Mobile search was another rapidly growing