There is more bad news for digital advertising, which oh-so-many Web start-ups count on for revenue. The price advertisers are willing to pay for ad space online is down 27 percent this year, according to a PubMatic report released Wednesday.

“We’re definitely seeing a softening in the market due to the ongoing malaise in the offline economy,” said Rajeev Goel, president and co-founder of PubMatic, which helps publishers find space across ad networks.

PubMatic tracked the sale of display ads through ad networks on Web sites in 20 different topic areas. Ads on social networks fetched the smallest price per thousand eyeballs — 21 cents, down 22 percent from the second quarter. Ads on sports sites were next lowest, at 25 cents. Ad prices on entertainment sites saw the steepest drop, to 33 cents.

Ads on business and finance sites had relatively high prices, at 86 cents, but that was down 22 percent from the second quarter. Web sites about technology were the only category that didn’t see ad prices fall — they stayed flat at 57 cents per thousand pairs of eyeballs.

Ads on small Web sites, those that get fewer than 1 million page views per month, sold on ad networks for three times as much as space on big sites with more than 100 million page views per month. The average price advertisers paid for every thousand pairs of eyeballs that viewed their ads was 61 cents on small Web sites and 18 cents on large sites.

That’s because small sites have niche content so advertisers can reach a more targeted audience, Mr. Goel said. For example, a teenager in the United States and Mr. Goel’s aunt in India both use Facebook, he said, so an advertiser who buys space via an ad network doesn’t know who is seeing that ad. A small site dedicated to vacationing in Eugene, Oregon, for example, or to restaurant reviews in Albany, N.Y., would have a more defined set of readers.

Then again, GigaOM on Tuesday raised the question of whether people even look at display ads on Web sites. One analyst who studied people’s Internet behavior and tracked their eye movement found that they do not look at picture ads — no matter how much the advertiser paid.