Get your fair share of the ad network pie
The buzz around ad networks and ad serving technologies couldn’t be louder: The Google/DoubleClick merger is moving forward, new ad exchanges continue to pop up on a monthly basis, and just last week Forbes and ESPN followed Martha Stewart’s lead to start their own ad network.
Last week’s actions prove that publishers want a piece of the online advertising pie. After analyzing content monetization across 68 million domains, it’s clear that publishers have a huge opportunity to collect revenue directly from ad networks. (If you are like me and need a refresher on the difference between an Ad Server and an Ad Network, there is a good description here .)
What we did:
We analyzed the ad-server calls across 68 million domains captured from our January, 2008 crawling operations. The data was joined with January, 2008 unique user data from our friends at Compete to determine market share numbers.
What we found:
- DoubleClick and Google dominate overall market share capturing 35% and 34% of unique users, respectively.
- DoubleClick owns the head and Google owns the tail. For sites with over 1MM monthly unique users, Doubleclick has a 48% share, a 3x advantage over 2nd place Yahoo. For sites with less than 100k monthly unique users, Google has an 8x share advantage over 2nd place MSN.
- Professionally produced content is widely proliferated across highly trafficked, commercial sites, representing an untapped opportunity for publishers to increase their revenue through content licensing, ad revenue share or link-building.
Conclusions:
- The GoogleClick combination is an ad-serving juggernaut. They should be at the top of your call list to collect a % off of every ad dollar made off your content.
- Content is proliferating all over the place – Attributor finds an average of 20 different copies for each article we track.
- There is a lot of money at stake. 64% of the copies have ads on their pages and most republishing is on sites with > 1MM monthly unique users.
- It’s an SEO goldmine. 57% of the copies we find do not link back to the original sites.
Stay tuned for regular reports on the pace at which articles, images and videos are spreading across the web and implications for the online content economy.
Methodology notes: This report represents a snapshot of ad server distribution in January, 2008 across 68 million domains Less than 5% of the domains contained more than one ad server call – in these cases, the traffic for the domain was associated with each ad network found. We did not attempt to de-duplicate the unique user numbers.
SearcH◆ EngineS WEB Said, March 31, 2008 @ 4:21 am
As concerns for online privacy increase, it will be interesting to see how Google resolves that with their increasing dependency on getting more analytical information to serve appropriate ads.
Ad Guru Said, April 1, 2008 @ 5:28 am
Does anybody know the daily impression counts that were used to derive these numbers? In other words, what is the absolute number of impressions being served on a daily basis?
Rich Said, April 1, 2008 @ 6:53 am
Ad Guru: The impression counts are the monthly numbers from compete.com for each domain with an ad. We are looking to ad page level impression estimates in an upcoming version of our service.
nmw Said, April 1, 2008 @ 8:23 am
Is it a correct interpretation of these statistics to note that only 0.34% of ALL web sites (117 thousand out of 68 million domains) include ANY content that might qualify as advertising?
Rich Said, April 1, 2008 @ 10:36 am
nmw: No, but thanks for pointing out as it is a little misleading. What is displayed above is only the top six ad networks – we cut off most of the really small players.
More pertinent to your question is that we limited the market share analysis to the top million domains published by compete.com as this was our source for the unique user calculation. Sorry, I should have made this more clear.
Another mitigating factor is that we don’t crawl every domain on a continuous basis every month – for some domains, the ad findings are just a snapshot of a point in time in January.
I hope that helps – happy to answer other questions.
nmw Said, April 1, 2008 @ 1:38 pm
Thanks, Rich — that does make it clearer (though it still seems like only a small number of sites currently run the types of ads being analyzed).
Rich Said, April 1, 2008 @ 5:37 pm
No problem – I’m glad it helped.
nbd Said, April 7, 2008 @ 9:04 pm
Hi – what do you mean by it being an SEO gold-mine? Can you perhaps elaborate a little more on this? Thanks.
Rich Said, April 7, 2008 @ 9:50 pm
Sure – I should have phrased as a “link-building goldmine”.
57% of the copies we find do not link back to the original article. A good portion of these are commercial sites re-using 100% of an article, presenting a clear licensing or ad-sharing opportunity.
That said, many of the copies that Attributor finds represent less than 50% of the original article, making it harder to justify a pure licensing agreement; instead, we offer the ability to request links and automatically monitor whether they are added.
The number and quality of your inbound links are key factors in how highly you rank in search engines. As Aaron Wall of Seobook says, “Link Building is the SEO trump card for the foreseeable future”. Attributor helps by identifying your link opportunities and prioritizing them on their potential SEO impact.
If you or your company produces original content, there are links out there just waiting to be added which are going to boost your search traffic.
For a slightly expanded explanation, here is an article that was published today on MediaPost:
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=79525
patrice Said, September 10, 2008 @ 7:38 am
Just checking are these stats UK/US/both? I am trying to find out annual stats on number of unique display advertisers for UK and same for US?
Rich Said, September 10, 2008 @ 8:11 am
Patrice – there is no geographical boundary on these statistics. You could call them global, but they are defintiely skewed towards English language sites as the majority of our customers (U.S., Canada, U.K., Austrailia) are producing English content.
Sally Said, November 2, 2008 @ 6:53 pm
Where does Atlas fall in these stats? It seems like they should be up there with the top 6.
Rich Said, November 3, 2008 @ 10:31 pm
We thought so too but surprisingly Atlas didn’t make the top 6 in January. We just pulled the most recent numbers after implementing several improvements to our classification code since then and expanding our crawl. We’re a few weeks away from publishing the results, but my first peak has them higher this time.