When the iPad was first announced by Apple, ad people moaned that without Flash many websites would lose a valuable source of revenue. Ian Schafer, CEO of marketing agency Deep Focus, wrote "ads are almost 100% rendered in Adobe's Flash." Because Apple wouldn't support Flash, it would be screwing web publishers. Turns out that's not exactly true. New data from comScore reveals that just 40% of ads on the web are based on Flash or Rich Media. Plain old images in the form of jpegs are just as popular. And those jpegs show up anywhere.

This chart is from a deck put together by Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist

The thing that jumps out at you is the long and structural decline in newspaper ad revenue as a share of the total market. And that's why Hal put this slide in his deck.

But the thing that jumps out at me is the line called Internet. I don't know what that includes. It could just be display. It could be all Internet. I don't have time this morning to do the legwork to figure that out. But what this chart says is that over that past decade Internet has gone from nothing to 5% of all the ad spend in the US. That is the most bullish signal about investing in the Internet that I have seen this year. If you include audio over the Internet (what radio becomes) and video over the Internet (what TV and cable become) in the Internet line, then I bet Internet will someday be over two-thirds of the ad spend. Time to get get out our checkbook and start making some more bets.