BURST! MEDIA, the US internet advertising services group, is preparing to list in London, The Times has learnt, in a move that highlights the strength of the online advertising market.

The company, which was formed in 1995 and is a leading broker of online advertising, has already hired British advisers and hopes to float in the first half of this year.

Burst! Media, which is based in Burlington, Massachusetts, and its advisers, Altium Capital, refused to comment on the flotation, but sources said it is expected to list on the Alternative Investment Market at about the £100 million mark. It is understood that the group could make an announcement on its plans for an initial public offering (IPO) in the next few weeks, although it refused to confirm this.

While traditional advertising has come under increasing pressure, the digital advertising market, led by the internet, is booming. Internet advertising in Britain grew 41.3 per cent last year, ZenithOptimedia, the media buyer, says.

With the growth of the online market, the web has become an integral part of advertisers’ marketing strategies.

Burst! Media is understood to prefer London because it is keen to avoid the potential difficulties of listing in America.

In 2000, the company dropped plans to list on Nasdaq, the US exchange. In a letter to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the American market regulator, Jarvis Coffin, the chief executive, said at the time that the offering was “no longer in the best interest of the company and its members . . . under the current volatile market conditions.”

Burst! Media is believed to have withdrawn from the IPO because a number of leaders in the online advertising market had suffered big falls in their stock prices.

Mr Coffin said last year in an interview with an American newspaper: “We registered to go public in March of that year (2000). We had $450,000 in losses, which was nothing compared to other companies going public at that point.”

Though the online advertising market suffered in 2001 and 2002, Burst! Media is understood to have been profitable since 2003. In 2004, group revenue rose 70 per cent.

The company achieves more than four billion advertising impressions for more than 2,000 web publishers each month. It claims to reach one in three people across the websites it serves.

Burst! Media places the adverts on websites, and helps advertisers to manage and measure the success of their campaigns. Last year the company began selling advertising on weblogs, which could become a big market for advertisers.

Burst! Media is not expected to be the last group in the internet advertising market to seek a listing and a number of its rivals in the United States are believed to have held discussions about making similar moves.

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