• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 20, 2014

Internet ad revenue rose 15% to $23.1 billion during the first six months in 2014, compared with the same time period in 2013, per an IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report released Monday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

The report, prepared by PwC US, estimates that search revenue rose 4% to $9.1 billion compared with the first half of the year in 2013. Mobile revenue rose 76% to $5.3 billion. Mobile search contributed $2.7 billion, mobile display contributed $2.5 billion, and other mobile media contributed $103 million.

Brands continue to increase their commitment to interactive advertising, and mobile is seen as a crucial part of the marketing mix, per Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). He said that with revenue in the second half of the year traditionally surpassing the first half of the year, the industry expects an even stronger full year compared with last year.

Three advertising verticals contributed about 46% to revenue: retail at 21%, financial services at 13% and automotive at 12%.

Display-related advertising revenue rose 6% in the first half of 2014 to $6.5 billion, and accounted for 28% of digital advertising revenue overall.

Social media revenue -- including advertising on social platforms as well as social networking and social gaming Web sites and apps -- rose 58% to $2.9 billion in HY 2014, compared with the same six months in 2013.

Impression-based advertising for the first six months in 2014 rose 34% to $7.8 billion, and performance-based advertising at 65%, to nearly $15 billion.

Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group, in a research note published Monday, compares the IAB findings to observations made in the national TV advertising sector during the same period. "In other words, our conviction that national TV advertising is growing in-line with the state of the economy and that it is not experiencing an accelerated shift of spending from offline to online is affirmed with this data," he wrote.

"We have previously noted that on our estimates, contrary to generally prevailing views among some of the analyst community, internet-related advertising slowed in 2Q14, just as did television advertising and other media more broadly," Wieser writes. "This is a core component of our view that television is not suffering from a radical shift of spending trends beyond the vagaries of the advertising economy’s quarter to quarter moves. More specifically, new data from the primary trade group for internet advertising, the IAB, total online advertising (including that which ran on mobile devices) grew by 13.8% during the second quarter of 2014, decelerating from 16.4% growth in the first quarter."

Growth rates for Internet-related advertising are also much slower than we saw during the same periods in 2013, Wieser explains. Last year's comparable figures were more than 18.0% during the first quarter in 2013 and  more than 17.6% during 2Q13.

Notably, the half-year Internet ad revenue since the IAB began measurements in 1996 began at a base of $83 million -- rising to $4 billion in 2000, and $20 billion in 2013.