As if you didn’t already know this: the pharmaceutical industry is shifting more of its ad spending to the Internet. Okay, but eMarketer pulled together some interesting figures:

Overall, online ad spending by drug and healthcare companies will hit $975 million this year, up 19 percent. And of the total, about 42 percent, or roughly $410 million, will be search advertising, simply because a lot of traffic to health websites came through search engines.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical web sites account for 17 percent of all U.S. web site visitors, the vast majority of whom are college educated while spanning all age groups. For the moment, many of them also trust these sites: 37 percent found health info on the Internet to be very reliable, up from 25 percent in 2005. And 53 percent said the info was somewhat reliable.

Moreover, 64 percent of web site visitors are seeking info on specific diseases or medical problems, which means big opportunity for drugmakers that want to use the Internet.

In short, there will be an explosion of this sort of advertising on the Internet. But this poses a real challenge for the FDA. Can these sites be monitored sufficiently? And will drugmakers and their ad agencies learn from recent outcries over ad content? Or will this become yet another battleground? [tags]Advertising, Internet, Web Sites[/tags]