According to eMarketer, Internet marketers are set to spend more money on online display advertising than search marketing by 2015.

While search advertising attracts the most online ad dollars right now, the steep growth in online video ad spending, combined with steady increases in banner advertising, mean that display advertising will usurp search within the next four years.

Surprise, surprise. People who own tablet devices such as Apple’s iPad tend to spend less time on desktops, laptops, netbooks and e-readers.

According to the results of The Nielsen Company’s survey of 12,000 U.S. tablet users, 77 percent of tablet users now use their tablet devices for actions they previously performed on their laptops or desktop computers.

Local search advertising spending is set to rise from $5.1 billion in 2010 to $8.2 billion by 2015, reflecting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10 percent, according to BIA/Kelsey research.

BIA/Kelsey expects more local advertisers to invest in paid search advertising such that, by 2015, 30 percent of all paid search volume will be local in nature.

AT&T ads were seen about 19.5 billion times in the first quarter of 2011, resulting in the telecommunications carrier taking the top spot amid the biggest display advertisers.

Based on comScore data, AT&T was responsible for 19.5 billion display ad impressions served to U.S Internet users in Q1 2011. This means AT&T ad impressions amounted to 1.8 percent of all display ad impressions during the period.

Just how many times are online display ads viewed by U.S. Internet users? How about 1.11 trillion times, according to comScore data for the first quarter of 2011.

comScore’s Ad Metrix research shows that around 1.11 trillion display ads (including static and rich media ads but not video ads, house ads or tiny ads of less than 2,500 pixels in dimension) were delivered to U.S. Internet users in Q1 2011.

Internet advertising revenues rose 15 percent to a record $26 billion in 2010, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Fourth quarter online ad revenues climbed to $7.45 billion, up 18 percent over Q4 2009 and 15 percent more than in Q3 2010.

The IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report also reports that in 2010:

BIA/Kelsey’s U.S. Local Media Annual Forecast (2010-2015) forecasts local online advertising to almost double from $21.7 billion in 2010 to $42.5 billion by 2015.

The research firm’s estimate suggests that local online advertising will grow at around 14.4 percent per annum (compounded) over the next 5 years.

Google has just launched ‘+1′. Google +1 is a button that will appear alongside Google’s search results, Google Adwords ads and other web content which people can click on to recommend to their Google contacts, much in the same way as people use Facebook’s ‘Like’ button.

You need to have, and be logged into, a Google account to use Google +1 to recommend and share content. Also, when you first click the +1 button you can choose whether or not to let Google use that behavioral information to personalize ads and other content.

User testing by User Centric indicates that most search engine users ignore paid search listings or pay-per-click (PPC) ads. That means Internet marketers are wise to renew their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts in order to increase their organic search rankings and capture the attention of search engine users.

An experiment by User Centric found that test subjects averaged 14.7 and 10.7 seconds looking at organic search results on Google and Bing, respectively. Only 28 percent spent even 1 second looking at paid ads on Google and only 21 percent spent a second looking at paid search ads on Bing. The rest ignored the PPC ads altogether.

Online advertising network Chitika, Inc. has settled the lawsuit brought against it by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in February 2010. The FTC sued Chitika over its behavioral targeting based ad platform which, instead of letting Internet users opt-out of behavioral based ads for 10 years, actually set opt-outs to 10 days.

Chitika said that it fixed the problem upon learning of the bug, and that the 10-year expiry has worked since March 2010. According to the company, during the nearly two years (May 2008 to February 2010) that the bug persisted only around 30 people per month were affected, out of some 450 million monthly unique users.