Paid Content reporter David Kaplan has summarized the main points of an eMarketer forecast today:

“Despite some economic weakness, and diminished display ad spending from the mortgage industry, online ad spend will be up 26.8 percent over last year—$21.4 billion—accounting for 7.4 percent of the total ad spend . . . Demonstrating the likelihood of online’s continued resiliency, eMarketer notes that in a year when its total ad spending fell by 19.8 percent, General Motors increased its internet spend by 14.7 percent last year.”

Kaplan asked eMarketer analyst David Hallerman, who prepared the forecast, about what such trends portend for ailing newspapers, which are trying to boost online readership as print declines. Said Hallerman: “(Newspapers) need 10 online readers to equal every print reader.” That’s because print ads fetch 10 times as much per reader as does online.

I am no means expert on ad spending but having tracked such reports for a couple of years now I prefer the TNS Media Intelligence report that tracks at ad spending, retrospectively, every six months. TNS publishes a chart with spending by sector breakdowns, such as this summary which was included in its First Half 2007 report issued in September:

* * *

Production note: I only recently learned how to do what I just did – excerpt a visual, as in the above chart – and plunk it into a blog for information and/or decorative purposes. My sister, Tina (Parental Wisdom) Nocera, taught me how to do the cutting part with SnagIt to clip excerpts from any source and turn them into a JPG files. Some months ago, Tim Bishop taught me how to use EasyThumbnails to get JPGs ready for import to the blog, which allowed me to include all sorts of pictures in JPG and Bitmap formats. Thanks!