The total amount spent on online advertising keeps rising, industry figures show.

The tally for the first six months of this year was $12.1 billion, a new half-year record and an increase of 11.3 percent over the same period in 2009, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The biggest portion — nearly half — still goes to search ads, the text and links that search engine companies like Google Inc. sell alongside search results. Search advertising climbed 11.6 percent to $5.7 billion in the first half of the year, accounting for 47 percent of the total.

Revenue from so-called "display" advertising, which includes banner and video ads, grew 16 percent to $4.4 billion.