Online advertising has achieved what was predicted at the end of last year and become the dominant medium for advertising spend in Australia, with $3.6bn revenue.

The  new figures, released in the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Online Advertising Expenditure Report, show it has overtaken  free-to-air TV, after overhauling newspapers last year adding $500m to June 2013.

For the first six months of the year online took $1,882.6m, while FTA got $1,805.4m according to the report compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Mobile has driven the growth with a 190% increase year-on-year, which has slowed from the 212% growth flagged in last year’s report, reaching $45.9m for the second quarter of the year, with 58% of that tablet based.

Video display ads also grew 56% year-on-year for the June quarter, taking $35.7m.

While search and directories ads make up 53.8% of the revenue general display advertising is still at 27.3%, with classifieds making up 18.9%.

Whilst Facebook and Google do not give out their local ad spend figures the report uses a formula to estimate what the companies are taking locally.

Gai Le Roy, Director of Research for IAB Australia commented: "Achieving $3.6b in online advertising revenue in a challenging advertising environment is a great result for the industry and the double digital growth in each of the three digital advertising sectors is exceptional.