According to a report by eMarketer, the idea that the portal is dead is premature, at the least. Their report shows that for the big four - Yahoo! (YHOO), AOL (TWX), MSN (MSFT) and Google (GOOG), they accounted for 57.4 percent of the total Internet ad spend in 2006.
Another interesting finding is that the share of the Internet ad spend for portals is growing, not decreasing. This year it is projected that the portals will account for two-thirds of the total online ad revenue.
"As traditional marketers move more money online, they look for safety in established, mass-market brands, and portals are that," says David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst and the author of the new Portal Marketing: The Big Four report. "Other than Google, the large portals are at least 10 years old, and all four average 100 million or more unique visitors monthly."
Hallerman added though, that when you look at growth rates, they have been starting to slow down, Google for example, has dropped in percentage year after year, although still remains the largest portal for online ad revenue. Yahoo has also flattened out some, growing at the same pace for hte last couple of years.
AOL has increased by 36 percent, but that's mainly because they're newer to the group and are making that their business model. That will start to decrease once a certain scale is reached. Still, it's growing much faster than originally expected, and should for a couple of years.
The conclusion by Hallerman was that for the near future at least the portals should flourish in ad revenue. I think he's right. The next few posts we'll talk about why this will happen and what it means to all online marketers that are building businesses based upon ad models.
The Whole Series on Portals:
Similarity Between Portals and Network Television
Another Reason Why Portals Will be Attractive for Some Time
3 Reasons Why Ad Spending is Growing on Portals
What does all of this mean to online marketers?
» Portals are Still Growing Ad Revenue, What's Going On? - Part 4 from TheAlphaMarketer
3 Reasons Why Ad Spending is Growing on Portals We've been talking about the reason why people visit portals, now let's take some time to understand why companies in general prefer to market on them so strongly.There's probably three main... [Read More]
Tracked on: March 20, 2007 12:07 AM | Permalink to Trackback