media - How booming is the online ad market?

Optimistic noises from - this time - VNU net that sees a booming online ad market. Even when the figures are correct - and there are many reasons to have serious doubts about that - the 120 million (US?) dollar market seems tiny: about one dollar per internet user and 0.1 dollar per Chinese consumer.
Then, the question is how reliable are the few research companies in this field. VNU Net quotes Analysys International from Beijing, who recently announced that China had 30 million weblogs and half of the white collar workers would be bloggers. Even when you are very optimistic about blogging, that seemed a very unbelievable figure.
Their competitor Iresearch from Shanghai is not preceived to be more trustworthy. the official CNNIC is doing better, but since they are government-funded, you cannot really call them independent.
Western search engine representatives complained about the lack of independent third party research into the market. The problem is of course that too few players want to pay for this kind of research, putting the research companies in a Catch-22 situation.
Those problems of underfunding are not only a problem in internet-research. Also the TV-ratings in China of a renowned company like AC Nielsen came under fire last year. They only use 300 households to cover their ratings, a very low number according to any standard for a country with 1.3 billion people.