Australia's online advertising market reached a spend of $14.7bn for the 2023 calendar year, up 3.7% on 2022 but down from the growth rate of 9.1% reported in 2022, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Australia Online Advertising Expenditure Report (OAER) prepared by PwC Australia.

General display advertising grew by 3.9% ($5.7bn) year-on-year, while search and directories saw a growth of 6.1% ($6.6bn). However, classified listings experienced a drop of 2.6% ($2.4bn), impacted by slower property and job market activity.

Within the general display advertising category, video was up 14% ($3.78bn) and overall digital audio was up 21% ($265.8m). Podcast investment saw a significant increase of 21.7%, almost hitting the $100m mark ($99.1m), and streaming increased by 20.6% to reach $166.7m. However, standard display was down 22% ($569.2m) and infeed/native formats were down 12% ($1.07 billion).

Connected TV continues to yield the greatest share of content publishers' video inventory expenditure (50%), taking share from mobile. Health and beauty replaced FMCG in the top five industry categories for general display in 2023.

For the December 2023 Quarter, total advertising expenditure was $3.914bn, up 7.5% compared to the 2022 December quarter. Search and directories grew 9.4% ($1.69bn) and general display saw a growth of 9.3% ($1.65bn) in the December 2023 Quarter. In December 2023, $0.36 of each dollar of expenditure on content publisher's general display was captured by retail and automotive.

"Advertisers continue to invest in a range of digital advertising opportunities to support what is now a $14.7b market. It was pleasing to see stronger growth in the second half of the year, but growth was mixed across categories as marketers under pressure for short term sales focused on strengthening their performance investment," said Gai Le Roy, CEO of IAB Australia.

In terms of methods of buying for content publishers inventory, the overall picture is similar to the previous year, but there are some shifts within programmatic guaranteed: its share of video buying has increased from 26% to 27% but for standard display it has decreased from 10% to 7%.