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.

“ As expected mobile advertising was the star performer as advertisers move their budgets to start matching consumer behaviour and video advertising growth continues to impress as marketers target the 13m Australians streaming video content each month.”