The online advertising market in Russia exceeded 380 billion rubles

For comparison, in the first half of 2023 the volume amounted to 254.7 billion rubles. The information is based on data from the Unified Internet Advertising Register (ERIR), which is maintained within the framework of the law on registration of all advertising on RuNet.

In total, 880.7 thousand advertisers reported having placed ads since the beginning of this year, up from 828 thousand the previous year. The number of advertising creatives has increased to more than 2 billion, compared to 1.2 billion in the first half of last year. Information on advertising contracts was provided by 4.4 thousand advertising agencies and more than 57 thousand advertising distributors and advertising system operators.

The promotion of large companies accounted for the largest part of the budget – 58.5%, that is, about 223.2 billion rubles. Of this amount, around 92 billion rubles come from the 41 largest advertisers, although the names of these companies are not included in the report. Each of them invested more than a billion rubles in Internet advertising. At the same time, advertisers with budgets less than 20 million rubles account for 99% of the total, but include about a third of all advertising budgets.

Despite the optimistic data, experts’ opinions on the results of the Roskomnadzor report differ. Anna Planina, director of digital technologies at NMi Group, believes that the ERIR data coincides with the agency’s internal estimates of the volume of digital advertising – 431 billion rubles. He notes that many companies, especially small and medium-sized ones, still prefer unscripted advertising for fear of losing the native character of the advertising message.

At the same time, Alexander Poluektov, head of digital transformation at Media Direction Group, believes that advertising included in the ERIR represents only 60-70% of all Internet activity. He explains this by the insufficient functioning of the accounting infrastructure.

The overall growth of the advertising market in Russia is associated not only with an increase in volumes, but also with the development of the accounting system. The introduction of fines for not labeling advertisements contributed to the registration of more advertising creatives. It is expected that in 2024 the volume of online advertising will amount to approximately 1 trillion rubles, and the main growth factors will be retail media and increased demand for digital advertising.

From September 1, 2023, fines were introduced for advertisers and distributors of advertising content for failure to provide advertising information to the RKN. Liability also applies for untimely transmission of data or the provision of incomplete or inaccurate information.