Yahoo! and its potential buyers lead US web advertising rankings

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 03 February 2008 15:21

Your IT - Home IT

With Microsoft offering to buy Yahoo! and now News Ltd rumoured to be mounting a rival offer, a ranking of sites by display ads viewed, in the US, gives an interesting picture of how one or other of these combinations would dominate the market, leaving Google way behind. According to ComScore's rankings of the top US Internet properties based on the number of display ad impressions delivered, a combination of Yahoo! and Microsoft would command 25 percent of the market and Yahoo! with News Ltd's Fox Interactive a whopping 35 percent compared to Google's one percent.

ComScore observes that nearly half (49.1 percent) of all display ads seen by US Internet users originate on only five properties - Yahoo! Fox Interactive, Microsoft, Time Warner and Facebook - illustrating the concentration of advertising among a few properties.

ComScore says its rankings are based on the number of display ad impressions delivered. It defines display ads as "any rich media or static images that are served and loaded into a Web browser, but do not include video streams, text or paid search ad impressions."

ComScore claims that its technology records the ads as they are actually rendered on an Internet user's computer, as opposed to other technologies that only 'spider' publisher sites for ads but are not able to record the actual delivery of all ads, especially behaviourally targeted ads, to the sites' visitors.

"Since just a handful of publisher properties deliver a preponderance of display ads, when one goes beyond the top properties it's clear how fragmented the online advertising market is, underscoring the importance of advertising networks in aggregating the long tail," said Alistair Sutcliffe, vice president of comScore Advertising Solutions..

ComScore has also ranked the top 20 ad publishers by the number of ads served per user visit. On this ranking, Fox Interactive comes out of well on with 47.5 ads per users visit, "a particularly high number that is a function of both site engagement and how many ads are displayed per page," according to ComScore. Bebo is next (27.2) followed by CBS Sports (22.6), Viacom Digital (20.6) and Yahoo! Sites (20.5).

All the figures are for the month of November 2007.