Social Media advertising slated to be fastest-growing space in 2009

The Online Media Daily reported some numbers on the advertising space from this morning’s Interpublic report, showing, unsurprisingly, an overall slow down in the growth rate of ad spending across the board.

But “slower than before” doesn’t mean “not growing” and it doesn’t necessarily mean “growing slowly,” either:

The fastest growing of the emerging media platforms tracked by Magna, he said, is social media, which includes both social networks and applications like ad-supported widgets. Wieser estimated that social media ad spending would rise 37.4% in 2009, thought that is nearly half the 60.8% rate it is expected to grow in 2008.

Now that the search advertising formula has been pretty well nailed by AdSense and, to a certain extent, Yahoo! and MSN, advertisers are exploring the new social media market.

Conventional wisdom goes that the returns on advertising in social networks are horrible, but then again, maybe we just haven’t found the right ad format yet.

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