Internet advertising is exerting a far-reaching impact on the pattern of traditional media. Yesterday, Beijing IResearch released the "2006 Internet Advertising Market Report". According to the report, the total Internet advertising market reached RMB 6 billion (775 million USD) last year surpassing radio or magazine revenues. The Internet has become China's "third media", following only to television and newspapers.

IResearch is a third-party commercial research company releasing more than forty aggregate market reports in a year. The "2006 Internet Advertising Market Report" shows that the network marketing market in 2006 has reached RMB 6 billion (775 million USD), a growth rate of 44% compared with RMB 4.17 billion (539 million USD) in 2005 and 13 times that in 2001. This figure has surpassed traditional media broadcasting (RMB 5 billion, or 646 million USD) and magazines (RMB 3.1 billion or 401 million USD), second only to television (RMB 43.5 billion or 5.6 billion USD) and newspapers (RMB 28 billion or 3.6 billion USD). IResearch states that the advertising market has showed a growth of overall revenues this year. The growth momentum of newspapers is the weakest with an increase of only RMB 800 million (103.4 million USD). Internet advertising has demonstrated the most sizeable momentum with an increase of nearly RMB 2 billion (258.4 million USD).

Advertising revenues from search engines have also showed explosive growth. If the income of channel agents is not counted, the domestic search engine advertising revenues in 2006 were RMB 1.35 billion (174.4 million USD) which developed at an astonishing pace compared with RMB 570 million (73.7 million USD) in the previous year. Baidu, Google and other search engine websites have showed the most outstanding performances.

The report shows that IT, automobile and real estate enterprises have become the largest advertising customers, with a total share accounting for more than 70% of total Internet advertising.

Industry commentators have noted that the numbers of the report come from the monitoring of large-scale, domestic websites and the revenue data of traditional media advertising comes from the State Administration for Industry and Commerce.