In terms of gross media spending, the Internet was the fourth type of medium in the Netherlands with a share of 8.3% in total gross media spending in 2016. Gross media spending on online display and video advertising amounted to € 586 million. This makes the internet bigger than out of home and public magazines. This is apparent from the new registration that Nielsen started in the Netherlands in 2016. With € 62 million in gross media spending, car brands spent the most on online advertising in the Netherlands in 2016.
Nielsen is the first and only to provide insight into gross media spending on online display and video advertising. The new registration is part of a worldwide roll-out. After England, the new registration started in Germany and the United States in addition to the Netherlands. Belgium, Italy, Turkey and many other countries are currently working on the introduction of the new online registration.
The figures on online display advertising in 2016:
- Gross media spending: €586 million
- Over 10,000 unique advertisers
- Nearly 12,000 brands
- Over 11 million ads
- 2.5 billion ad impressions
- 300 sites
Internet fourth medium type
Based on the new registration, the Internet’s share in total gross media expenditure was 8.3%. This puts out of home (7%) and public magazines (4.5%) at a considerable distance. Only television, with 54% by far the largest medium type measured in gross media expenditure, radio and newspapers with 11.5% and 10.2% respectively are even bigger.
Automakers largest online spenders
Brick and mortar retailers are the largest advertisers in total media spending, but online they are in fifth place with € 25 million. Only 3% of their total media budget of almost €990 million goes to online. With just under €36 million, webshops spent significantly more online and the share of the internet in their media mix is also much larger at 15%. Automakers spend by far the most online with €62.5 million, or 14% of their total media budget. Investment (46%) and software products (49%) of the larger industries spend the majority of their advertising dollars online.
Fisher Investments largest online brand
While automakers spent the most on online advertising, Fisher Investments is the largest brand. The total gross media expenditure of this investment product amounted to € 22 million in 2016. The brand did not use other media types to advertise. The first car brand in the top 25 online brands is Renault with € 12 million. This puts the French car brand in third place. It spent nearly one-fifth of its total media budget online. Second is Coolblue, which spent more than €13 million on online display advertising, almost 60% of the total media budget.
Desktop and display dominate
Consumers are spending more and more time on mobile devices, but media spending is still lagging behind. At €470 million, just over 80% of gross media spend on online display advertising went to the desktop versions of websites.
The same dominance was seen when using display versus video. Advertisers spent more than €500 million on display ads, with the ‘traditional’ form of online advertising claiming more than 85% of gross media spend.
By far most online advertisements purchased programmatically
More than 70% of the total gross media expenditure on online advertising is purchased programmatically. In terms of numbers of ads, the relationship between direct buy and programmatic looks slightly different. Programmatic is still leading, but the ratio there is about two-thirds programmatic and one-third manual. Most advertisements are therefore traded programmatically. On desktop this applied to 70% of the advertisements, on mobile devices to just over three quarters of all advertisements.
The dominance of the gross media expenditure on programmatic arises from the fact that Nielsen uses the same rates for both manual purchase (‘direct buy’) and programmatic (according to the rate card), because Nielsen measures the media pressure with the gross media expenditure and not the actual (net ) spending.
Desktop generates most gross media spend
Measured in gross media spending, telegraaf.nl was the largest site in 2016. The share of gross media spending via the desktop version of the news site was 80%. At nu.nl, fourth in the ranking, the desktop share was over 70%, while the desktop version of ad.nl (8th in the ranking) accounted for 65% of the site’s gross media expenditure. Averaged across all sites, desktop accounted for 80% of gross media spend.
About the registration of online display advertising
In January 2016, Nielsen started a new and improved registration of gross media spend on online display advertising. The improvement not only means that Nielsen will register more online advertisements (including HTML5 and advanced java scripts), but also that much more details will be provided.
The registration relates to the 300 largest Dutch websites in terms of reach (page views), whereby Nielsen measures the following per site:
- Display advertising op desk-/ laptop en mobile (tablet en smartphone)
- Video (pre-roll) op desk- / laptop
- Naast bruto mediabestedingen ook ad impressions
- Details over ad types (display en video), devices (desk- / laptop en mobile), ad sizes, ad format, ad servers, visibility (above en below the fold) en buy type (direct versus programmatic)
