While the three major portals, Yahoo (YHOO), AOL (TWX) and MSN (MSFT) may not sound too exciting to many, they are exciting for independent digital ad firm, Avenue A/Razorfish, as together they grew their share of the company's ad spending by 13 percent for 2006. Together they accounted for 24 percent of the companys' overall media spending.
The major driver behind the increase is the growth in brand advertising budgets online along with AOL's migration to an ad-supported model.
To show the strength in brand advertising, even with AOL increasing billings by 454 percent over last year, they didn't take any share away from Yahoo or MSN, as the overall category grew strongly. For MSN and Yahoo spending on them increased by over 80 percent last year.
In a continuing problem for social networking sites, only those targeting younger demographics are spending much money there as they are waiting for the sites to be made safer for their brands before they commit more dollars.
For search, the company knew that the share would decrease as companies increase their brand ad budgets. Still, they did increase by 17 percent, although with other ad growth it was only 28 percent of the overall billings of 2006 for Avenue A/Razorfish, down from the 31 percent it represented in 2005.
In a story I've heard from other companies as well - in spite of the hype concerning video advertising - for "Avenue" it didn't even come up on their radar as far as volume goes, confirming what many others said as well.
» AOL Inks Two Year Preferred Portal Deal With PointRoll from TheAlphaMarketer
On the surface, the preferred portal deal between AOL and rich media provider PointRoll may not seem like much, but I think this is a real opportunity for AOL especially.First, in the rich media arena, PointRoll owns a market share... [Read More]
Tracked on: March 13, 2007 10:46 PM | Permalink to Trackback