Advertising network surveys

Posted by Sam Soltano on 23 April 2010 in News, Advertising Networks

Advertising networks are online services that connect advertisers and publishers. Many websites rely on advertising as an income stream, often the only one. Occasionally website owners sell advertising space directly to advertisers, but most sites, even the largest, nowadays use advertising networks. They offer easy access to a large pool of advertisers, and normally some kind of bidding process ensures a fair price for the ad placements.

Our new ad network survey shows, that the largest ad network is AdSense by Google. That's where Google makes most of its profit. The second largest network, DoubleClick, is also owned by Google. Then we see a long list of alternative networks, some of them specialists, some part of a larger company such as Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft.

If we look at the usage of ad networks broken down by site ranking, we see that AdSense is not the most popular network for the top 1.000 sites, but its twin DoubleClick. We also see that Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft are doing better amongst the top ranking sites, possibly because they own a fair amount of these sites themselves.

Advertising networks are a fast changing business. We see start-ups with innovative ideas, often bought up by a large network after a while. It will be interesting to see how that surveys change over time.

Leave a comment