In a report published today it was revealed that the internet in the UK alone is worth £100 billion to the economy, representing more than a 7% share of total national income.

The study, carried out by the Boston Consulting Group on behalf of Google, the internet’s most successful company, places a value on the UK internet market for the first time.

If it were an industry in its own right the internet would be more than twice the value of the UK hotel and restaurant market and nearly as big as the financial sector, which accounts for 9% of Gross Domestic Products in 2009.

However, the research did find that there is a digital divide in the UK, with certain parts of the country – namely Scotland and Northern Ireland – lagging far behind London and the south-east.

In an interesting twist in the report, it turns out that British consumers are more willing to spend money online than can be typically seen elsewhere. E-commerce drives a large section of the internet’s expansion; as a proportion of retail sales, online transactions in the UK are high.

To emphasise this point, the UK has the largest e-commerce market in the world when measured by the amount spent per capita. The popularity of buying goods and services has also fueled a boom in the amount companies are prepared to pay for online marketing as heavy spending can help attract users to their sites.

The online advertising market in Britain is worth £3.5 billion and is the biggest anywhere outside the US.

It is forecasted that the internet economy is to continue to boom with 10% year on year growth projected for the next 5 years. If this trend comes to fruition then the internet economy will contribute up to 13% of GDP by the year 2015. For an idea of scale the current internet economy is already larger than the utility and transport industries put together.          

The report also highlights the success of small firms using the internet to increase global sales. The UK now exports goods and services which are worth £2.80 for every £1 it imports. Google’s annual turnover was £23.6bn last year which encompasses very nearly a quarter of the £100 billion contribution the entire internet made to the UK economy in 2009.

Overnight, Google started rolling out a new layout for Places, the map listings that appear at the top of the search results for queries that include a city/town name.

The new layout looks like this:

Visually, the page is quite different. The map has been taken from its central position to the right hand column and now floats as a user scrolls up and down the page. The seven results that used to accompany the map have now been separated and are mixed in with the 'natural' search results.

This proves Google's commitment to local search. The new results show a lot less directories and aggregator sites and a lot more websites that belong to the cities being searched. SEO for a city that your business does not belong in just got a lot tougher and businesses that were relying on Places for traffic that did not own a website (i.e. a lot of trades people) appear to be out in the cold as the left hand side results are pulling data from a websites title and meta description. 

Writing AdWords copy has become a modern day art form, one that many SEM’s have refined over years to take advantage of the 4 line structure. I’m sure we have all slaved over that phrase or line which is just 1 character too long! Well, Google have recently made things more challenging – thanks very much - by adding variable line lengths to the equation.

In the past we have written ads which fit within the following structure:

Title: 25 characters max
Line 2: 35 characters max
Line 3: 35 characters max
Display URL: 35 characters max

This strict format has often seen punctuation omitted in favour of that last character and to date we have been able to get away with it because we know exactly how our ad will appear in Google. Variable line lengths change this by expanding or contracting the line length in relation to the size of a user’s browser.

The result is that an ad you may have spent ages over will now appear in a completely different way to different users thereby losing some of its advertising appeal in the process.

So what does this mean for future copy?

Good copywriters won’t be fazed by this change. A good copywriter will create dynamic copy which reads well regardless, but the correct use of punctuation will now become critical to ensure your advertising message gets through the way you intended. Reviewing existing ads and altering them accordingly would also be advisable.

The first half of 2010 has seen a dramatic rise in the total spend by British organisations on online advertising, up 10% from last year to £1.97 billion.

The bi-annual online advertising expenditure study produced by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers, puts the increase down to a large surge in the video and social network advertising budgets of many small and medium sized companies.

With a current market share of 24.3% of the total UK advertising spend; online advertising is now becoming a major consideration for many businesses. The 10% increase in online advertising is within a context of a 6.3% rise in total UK advertising spend to £8.1 billion, which shows positive signs relating to the increasing confidence in the economy.

The highest spending could be seen in the entertainment and media sector, which has always relied heavily upon advertising within the digital sector. This accounted for 14.4% of total online advertising spend in the UK, followed by finance and fast moving consumer goods.  

In what was a largely positive study, figures reflected a sense of optimism in the industry which has not been seen for the past couple of years. Even retail, a sector which has been hit disproportionately severely by the economic collapse, experienced an increased online advertising spend from 7.1% in the first half of 2009 to 8.4% in the same period of 2010.

The chief executive of IAB, Guy Phillipson, commented: “The return to double digit growth in UK online advertising spend is characterised by increased investment by major brands, particularly in fast moving consumer goods and entertainment. The effectiveness of social and video ads for classic brand building is reflected in these formats enjoying exponential growth”.

The report indicates a number of drivers for the recent surge in growth, one being the increase in online users within the UK, mainly due to the proliferation of devices such as Smartphones.

The way people spend their time on the internet is also changing with the IAB claiming UK internet users are currently spending 23% of their time online using social networks and blogs.