Here’s the latest from the Rubicon Project. You can download the full report here:

State of the Market

Money, money, money. If there was an overarching theme for the fourth quarter of 2009 in the online advertising market, it was money. E-tailers were consumed with the task of trying to get consumers to spend more money online. Advertisers were figuring out where and how to spend their dollars most effectively over the course of the coming year. And media buyers were scrambling to spend the budget surplus – a.k.a. “scatter” campaigns – clients had been accruing since the start of the year.

Holiday Spending

In terms of e-commerce, Q409 turned out slightly better than analysts and forecasters expected. Between November 1st and December 31st, online shoppers spent $29.1 billion, according to comScore.1 That’s up 4 percent vs. 2008. “Cyber Monday” sales were up 5 percent, and the industry came close to its first near billion-dollar day, with spending on December 15th topping $913 million.

Meanwhile, big retail brands like Kmart diverted dollars typically spent on TV, print and radio ads to the web. Mark Snyder, Kmart’s CMO, told Adweek that the company’s online holiday budget had increased “exponentially” at the expense of print circulars.2 Kmart spent the money on custom sponsorships of online communities like Yahoo Shine instead – to better reach shoppers that “love to find and share information,” Snyder said.

A survey from the National Retail Foundation (NRF) and BIGresearch found that nearly half (47 percent) of retailers said they would increase their use of social media for the holidays, because it was “more cost-effective” than traditional advertising.3 Of course, there was OfficeMax’s requisite “Elf Yourself” pitch, but Best Buy and Kohl’s also launched games, giveaways and cartoons across Facebook, Twitter and various niche blogs.

While this spending shift might seem worrisome to some premium pubs fearing a loss of these new dollars to the portals, the results we saw in Q4 told a very different story.

One of the key points for me in this interesting research project around Baltimore, produced by the Pew Research centre, was the fact that 62% of web news was garnered directly from press releases and posted word for word. Particularly on twitter feeds and blogs.

This makes you appreciate the worthiness of news organisations like the BBC who put so much funding into their journalistic efforts.

You can find out more about the Pew research centre and their funding here and read the full report below, thanks to the Center for Media Research and MediaPost Publications:

The News Ecosystem Fosters Repetition

A new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that while the news landscape has rapidly expanded, 95% of what the public learns is still overwhelmingly driven by traditional media, particularly newspapers. The study, examining all of the outlets that produced local news in Baltimore, Md., for one week, finds that eight out of ten stories studied simply repeated or repackaged previously published information.

Read the rest of this article.