Online marketing spend in Russia will total between $1 billion (£610 million) and $1.5 billion (£920 million) this year as spending on most European countries plummets amid widespread fears of recessions and economic slowdown, reports Lenta.ru, via snfblog. The figures, from research firm Tagline which analysed 600 companies in Russia, show that spend on contextual ads will be between $320 million (£196 million) and $450 million (£276 million) by the end of the year while search spend is set to be between $250 million (£153 million) and $400 million (£254 million).

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Most countries are staring at successive periods of declines: IPA’s recentBellwether report showed that online ad spend in Britain was flat in Q308 and Enders cut its 2008 forecast from £3.56 billion to £3.33 billion, despite most in the industry predicting – or at least hoping – that online ad spend would weather a downturn and continue to grow. Tagline’s figures give a rather wide margin of error but it seems undisputable that Russia’s digital media industry is riding out the global downturn better than its neighbours to the west and to the east.