Here are some numbers: online advertising now accounts for around 10 percent of the total advertising spend in New Zealand; and the total online advertising spend for the first quarter of 2010 was $53.32m, up 12.31 per cent from the previous quarter.

It’s a not dissimilar level to the global online spend, with the Internet increasing its share of the global ad market from 10.5 per cent in 2008 to 12.6 per cent in 2009, (overtaking magazines for the first time) and expected to increase to more than 17 percent in 2012, according to communication firm ZenithOptimedia.

Put that alongside a trend visible mainly in the United States so far, where wealthy sponsors are starting to back online community newspapers to fill holes in local news coverage caused by shrinking newsrooms at traditional papers, and a pronounced swing to online communications is becoming clearly visible.

Or perhaps, more accurately, the value of online communication is being recognised and understood.

Do you get your news by picking up a paper from the dairy on the way to work, or is it easier to do some surfing at morning tea from your desk? Do you find products and services in magazines and newspapers or on TV; or do you turn to the net as your first port of call?

And, more importantly, where are your customers finding out about you? Online, online, online.

It is said that Google reaches about 167 terabytes of information on the open web but there are another 91,000 terabytes sitting in the ‘deep web’ that Google, Bing, Yahoo and other mainstream search engines can’t reach. Here’s an interesting article on 10 search engines, such as Infomine, DeepWebTech and Scirus, that can search the deep web to find those hidden libraries of knowledge you never knew existed.

When I first got the internet at home 12 or so years back, I remember the Actrix ISP guy telling me to make the most of it because, sooner rather than later, we’d all have to pay to view anything on the web.

Today, thankfully, I’m still waiting for that, and savvy businesses are making more and more online stuff free – many getting rich doing it.

Wired editor Chris Anderson for one firmly believes things are only going to get freer on the internet. In his new book, Free: the Future of a Radical Price, Anderson says, “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.”

Tomorrow, though, the National Business Review starts to charge for ‘premium’ content on its website. The move comes as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation also ponders widespread charges for reading its news websites. So far, reportedly, it has more than one million paid up subscribers to its Wall St Journal online service. Which way, if at all, things will tip is still pretty unclear.

And will this trend extend beyond the grumpy old  men of newspapers? It appears unlikely. The free internet has been a huge tool for smart PR campaigns (think the best job on the world) using free content and, of course, for the free spread of ideas and thought, in general.

UPDATE: I visited the NBR site Friday morning. Most of the top stories have Subscriber content next to them, and you must sign-on and pay to access them. Did I do this? No. Do I miss not getting the content? Yes. Is the content crucial for my work or life? No. Has the website now become a bit unhelpful for me? Yes. Does it make the site less worth visiting? Yes. Will the site lose a visitor and NBR advertisers a potential customer? Looks like it.

Continuing our look at plans for pay-perview internet: New Zealand had its own version of a pay-per-view internet with the NZ Herald’s premium service a couple of years back.

It reached the level of silliness where even freelance columnists who wrote for the paper were not able to access their own work online unless they paid to see it. That premium service quickly died a death and the site is now totally open again.

But does the idea have legs: a global survey finds readers unlikely to pay for general news they can get elsewhere for free, and local columnist Bernard Hickey thinks not.

And, if you missed our earlier posts, we highlighted free tools for online media releases and PR announcements and discussed whether pay-per-view websites would hinder PR?

For many years New Zealand news website Scoop has provided a free service for anyone to post media releases online, now the National Business Review has started offering a similar service – the Horse’s Mouth – for corporate and political party releases.

The good thing about both services is that the media releases go online unedited letting your message reach the world as you intended it to. Both sites also have good search engine visibility, so your media release gets a good headstart for people searching online.

NBR publisher Barry Colman said the move would allow a free flow of information  from which readers could draw their own conclusions. “Some of these releases would otherwise head straight for the can in a newsroom, or be edited down,” he said.

After my earlier post this week about News Corporation deciding to restrict access to their news websites unless people pay to view them, it’s great to see initiatives in New Zealand that are promoting greater freedom of online information.

Getting your company mentioned in the media and then having those mentions filter through the internet to be found by potential customers via search engines has, for many years, been a big part of getting company messages seen and heard.

Are those days coming to an end? Rupert Murdoch has reportedly announced today that people will have to pay to access his News Corporation’s newspapers’ websites.

News Corporation controls much of NZ’s media and has a huge influence around the world. Let’s hope a very useful channel for publicity is not shut off to the internet masses in favour only of people who can afford to pay to view.

How do you find and track yourself or your business online? How do you manage your online reputation?

With the online world a key environment for spreading PR messages, it is essential to be able to track those messages as well as their responses and any other mentions and conversations about your business.

Here’s an article detailing eight good tools for tracking stuff online and here’s another social media tracking tool.

And this tool — uberVU — is so new it hasn’t  even had its public beta release yet! But it’s already getting good press. It tracks conversations wherever they go on the web and then let you reply to, and manage, them from one place.

Now that sounds very promising: convergence of social media , we need that.

Here’s an interview with uberVU’s founders: