Money Rail: BIA/Kelsey Sees Local Online Ad Revenue Up 13% for 2012

I will be real honest here. I get confused as to who predicted what and when they predicted it regarding things like digital ad revenues for local media. These predictions seem to roll out all the time and it can be difficult to keep track.

The most recent offering comes from the BIA/Kelsey group who garners a fair amount of credibility in this increasingly complicated space. Halfway through 2012 the research firm is predicting a healthy uptick in overall ad revenues for 2012.

In its newly released U.S. Local Media Forecast (2011-2016): Full Edition, BIA/Kelsey forecasts local online/interactive/digital advertising revenues to grow 13.1 percent in 2012. According to the forecast, several local media segments are on target to exceed this overall growth rate, such as mobile search, which will grow 77.2 percent. Online video will grow 51.6 percent and social will grow 26.3 percent. For some media, like newspapers, digital ad revenues will be the only source of growth.

That last sentence is a bit sobering but not a surprise. We are used to watching the newspaper industry struggle its way through the transitional years. What’s harder to predict is which actual businesses will come out of this transformed or which ones will simply shrivel up and die.

But what about the future of local ad revenues as a whole, you ask? Well, the report predicts that the overall pie will be sliced like this in the year 2016.

While this prediction is just 4 short years away it seems pretty conservative in predicting what percentage of the local ad revenue will go to online channels don’t you think?

Well, what do you think? Please let us know in the comments.