This article (via InstaPundit) says online advertising has passed the levels seen during the dot-com era. That's interesting, because advertisers want to see a return on their marketing expenditures--if ads don't turn into sales, they don't keep throwing more money into a particular medium.
What's a big driver? It's broadband, which as I noted recently, has pulled even with dial up in terms of households using it. Broadband connections make ads less annoying because they download faster and don't slow down the display of a Web page the way they do on dialup. And broadband enables newer, richer kinds of ads with embedded movies and other multimedia widgets that don't work at all on dialup. And finally, Internet ads provide incredible feedback to advertisers, compared to the "black hole" of traditional media, where it's often quite difficult to determine who saw and ad and if they were interested in it.
All the advertising also means people are buying more....a sign of a strong economy.