KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 1 — Malaysian businesses spend just 1 per cent of their advertising budget on online media despite Malaysians spending more time on the Internet than any other media, a study has found.

The report by Google and McKinsey & Co released yesterday shows that Malaysian businesses placed in the bottom 10 per cent of 57 countries surveyed in terms of budget allocated for Internet media.

It also found that Malaysians spent more time on the Internet than on newspapers, watching television or listening to the radio, with Malaysians in their 30’s spending twice as much time on the Internet than on TV, the next most popular medium.

Google Malaysia country manager Sajith Sivanandan said the amount of advertising money spent on Internet media was disproportionate to the amount of time consumers spent on the Internet.

This was set to change, he said.

“Even children now know how to use the iPad before they know how to write,” he said.

He noted that in developed economies such as the UK, as much as 25-30 per cent of advertising budgets went to online media.

Nimal Manuel, principal at McKinsey & Co, said a challenge for advertisers was the difficulty in scaling up online advertising in developing economies.

“The ecosystem for digital advertising is still nascent,” he said.