WebProNews

We all knew that online ad spending would rise, but according to a new report from Forrester Research, European budgets for this sort of advertising will double over the next five years.

“The annual value of pan-European online advertising is set to reach 16bn euros ($22bn; £10.8bn) by 2012,” states the BBC.  Of course, Europe’s a pretty big place, so the article later narrows matters down by adding, “The UK will continue to see the most online advertising in the next four years, ahead of Germany and France.”

That’s not hard to believe, given the BBC’s recent experiments with social media.  For that matter, BBC execs have made commitments to being online for quite some time now.

But as the UK leaps ahead, don’t look for other European countries to hang back; various aspects of the report point to a strong growth (and wide spread) in internet use.  “[T]he research group showed that European internet users spend 14.3 hours per week online, compared to 11.3 hours watching TV and 4.4 hours reading newspapers and magazines,” notes a bigmouthmedia piece.

And from the report itself (via the BBC), another note on the business side of things: “After five years of dipping their toes into the online marketing waters, firms have come to realise that the net is a valuable medium for client acquisition, retention and market expansion.”