News Corp owned Fox Interactive Media (FIM), which owns social MySpace, has surpassed Yahoo! as the owner of the largest share of display advertising in the US according to comScore data.
In June, total display ad views on FIM sites was over 56.8 million views which makes up 15.9% of all display advertising in the US. Yahoo! sites served up 53.1 billion display ads in the same month for a 14.2% share. Top display advertisers on FIM include University of Phoenix & Deutsche Telekom while the top Yahoo! display advertisers are Netflix & Nextag.
Concerns at Yahoo?
This new data shows a change from May when Yahoo had 15.9% share and FIM had a 13.5% share. With Yahoo!’s stocks dipping below $20, there has been many concerns regarding whether Yahoo! will be able to maintain or grow their advertising business. Yahoo! has been under much pressure to show shareholders that their advertising business will continue to grow and remain strong after turning away a $47.5 billion offer from Microsoft.
Good News MySpace
FIM’s growth in the advertising business is good news for their social networking property MySpace which makes up nearly all of FIM’s display advertising revenue. However there continues to be a struggle for advertisers to generate revenue off of social networking sites as these ad medium has generally had a poorer conversion rate compared to other online marketing tactics.
MySpace has reported that their fiscal fourth quarter revenue grew 23% year to year to $225 million due to search and advertising gains. They also noted that their ability to “hyper target” in delivering ads to specific group of consumers has contributed to this growth.
Display Advertising
Forrester projects that $2.78 billion will be spent by retailers this year. That would make display advertising over a third of all online marketing which is projected to be $8.2 billion according to Forrester. Search Engine marketing makes up $3.63 billion and email marketing is third at $1.25 billion.
AOL, Microsoft & Google sites round out the top 5 display advertisers in terms of total market share followed by well known web properties Facebook & Ebay.
Microsoft was the top display advertiser with 5.5 billion display ad views (1.7% share) largely due to its promotional campaign for Live Search. The University of Phoenix, an online university came in second with 4.7 billion ad views (1.4%) followed by Experian Interactive, United Airlines, Verizon, and AT&T all at 3.8-3.9 billion ad views (1.2%).
Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM