Borrell Associates

A new report from Borrell Associates predicts that online could become the primary destination for local advertising dollars by 2013, while mobile advertising will steadily increase its share of local ad dollars, reaching 88% by 2016.

According to a Borrell Associates report, online automotive advertising is expected to rise 11%, from $6.6 billion to nearly $7.3 billion in 2011. Dealers are earmarking 32% of their ad budgets for interactive media this year, more than they spend on any other medium, the report said.

While newspapers still dominate when it comes to generating local online advertising dollars, Internet pure-plays — specifically fledgling daily deals site Groupon and car marketplace Autotrader.com — have made huge gains in the space, bringing in the most money in about one-fifth of the markets covered in Borrell Associate’s “Benchmarking Local Online Media: 2010 Revenue Survey.”

Borrell Associates’ latest survey of small and medium businesses, “2011 Outlook: SMBs Become Everybody’s New Best Friend,” found that SMBs are planning to increase online ad spending by 29% this year.

Academic Clay Christensen, Greater Media’s Peter Smyth and Gray Television’s Robert Prather emphasized that every employee’s input is valuabe to traditional media companies wanting to make a smooth and successful transformation into digital media companies: “What you want to do is create the environment where people have the ability to think,” Smyth said.

Two keys to creating a robust online presence are giving your audiences and advertisers what they want and keeping things personal, according to three of the biggest names in the local online business — AT&T Interactive, Autotrader.com and CityGrid Media.

On average, about 30% of the visitors to news sites don’t live in the market and about 25% of the page views are by “fly-bys” who may not visit the site for another year, if ever, according to a new study from Borrell Associates.

A new Borrell Associates report conducted for TVB finds the top local ad-spending categories continue to be general merchandise stores, car dealers and real estate agents. The report also forecasts 17% growth this year.

Local online media is booming in the Albany-Schenectady-Troy, N.Y., marketplace — the region clocks in as the nation’s second-fastest growing online ad market — with a large stable of newspaper and TV sites ready to feed the area’s politics-crazy audience.