The online advertising market in Europe in 2008 was 12.9 billion Euros, it grew 20% in comparison to previous years. However, this year still seems to be promising for the online advertising industry as IAB Europe and PricewaterhoueCoopers have analyzed the situation.

According to the reports, the strongest countries investing in online advertising are Slovenia with a 77%, Poland with 60%, Austria invests 45%, Finland 34% and Turkey 33%.Ironically, last year the top ten markets in Europe (which account for 93% of the total value of the advertising market) weren’t these countries.

The top ten markets went down in 2009 (Spain, France, Sweden, Italy, Germany, Norway, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands and England) being the countries mentioned before the strongest countries showing revenues from online advertising.

Most of the TV broadcasters have been investing in online advertising as a way to increase revenues; however, some specialist in the topic have released the information that investing in online ads won’t be enough to fund the current gap.

In the case of ABC, NBC, Fox, News Corp, Universal and Disney, all these online TV is being supported by major TV broadcasters. There is a shortfall of $2 billion ready to hit US broadcasters in the next years.

Despite this number, experts have commented that it is still too soon to say that online video advertising will not generate revenues.

Mr. Arash Amel has commented on the topic: “The challenge is to maximize the ad-supported online video business model, see how new forms of shortform and traditional longform content can drive growth, and explore more advanced methods of video advertising while there are still revenues from the traditional business to support the transition to multi-platform”.

For the first time ever, Internet companies and ad agencies are starting to work together to develop ways to make money from the digital media. Unlikely other situations in the past ,that they used to compete all the time, they have decided to unify strength and come up with a solution.

The Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival was held last week in France where Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, and Steven Ballmer, chief executive at Microsoft attended for the first time an annual advertising industry meeting.

Mr. Paul Kemp-Robertson, editor of Contagious, an online magazine specialized on digital marketing trends, commented about the possible fusion of Internet companies and ad agencies:” There was an air of inevitability about it, because of the model not really working yet, and there’s so much content that will be dependent on it working.”

The Tribune Co. and the Dallas Morning News have recently closed an advertising deal in which the parent company of the Los Angeles Times will be in charge of selling print and online ads for the Texas paper.

The print media has been trying to find a way to increase revenues but due to the economical crisis subscribers have stopped buying print newspapers or subscribing online.

Don Meek, President of Tribune365 National Solution Group commented about this partnership:”We are going to take advantage of what we have built as a company to give advertisers access to the top markets in the U.S. You add Dallas to Chicago and Los Angeles and you have three of the top five markets in the country.”

Thanks to this deal, the Dallas Morning News will be able to get stronger in competing with advertisers based outside of the state.