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Thursday, November 20, 2008
It's a bit surreal to juxtapose today's release from the IAB -- Internet Advertising Revenues for Q3 at $5.9 billion -- with Google's earnings release of last month, related to their Q3 earnings.
Since Google's revenues were $5.54 billion, you're apt to say: what the heck is going on here?
The IAB figures cover the U.S. only, of course.
But if you subtract Google's international revenues, their U.S.-only revenues for the quarter were all of $2.69 billion. So in the United States, this one company appears to be clocking about 46% of the revenues for the whole digital advertising sector. Twiddle a few knobs, and wait a quarter, and Google will be at around 50%. Among other things, you would imagine that this makes further acquisitions dicey for Google. One company moving from, say, 50% to 58% of share for an entire sector of such importance might make certain regulators nervous. (Not saying it's right, but that's sort of how the world works.)
Whether that's proof that Google is incredibly big, or the rest of the sector remains embarrassingly small given the gallons of ink devoted to it, I'll leave to your discretion. A third possibility is that display and other forms of online advertising have yet to reach the peak of efficiency achieved by Google's click auction.Labels: iab, online advertising
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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