After two straight quarters of annual declines (aka, the Great Ad Recession of 2009), it looks like online advertising revenues stabilized in the third quarter. The combined online advertising revenues of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL rose 1.2 percent to $8 billion. While the online advertising industry is not out of the woods yet, it might be stabilizing.
At least it is for Google, which was the only one of the four horsemen of Internet advertising to see its ad revenues rise in the quarter (up roughly $400 million from both last quarter and last year). Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft were all down on both a sequential and annual basis. (All the individual company figures are in the table below). Google benefits more from search advertising and is less exposed to display. The question now is whether display advertising will follow the recovery already being experienced by search advertising.
Since these four companies account for such a large portion of total Internet advertising, looking at their combined advertising revenue numbers serves as a good indicator of the health of the overall online advertising industry. I like to keep track of the combined total every quarter
These numbers represent global advertising revenues, and include network revenues paid to affiliates through AdSense and Yahoo’s ad network. Google’s licensing revenues for Google Enterprise Apps have been stripped out. For Microsoft and AOL, I include only the advertising portions of their online revenues as reported in their quarterly earnings statements. Microsoft restated revenues for its online division last quarter, largely due to the divestiture of Razorfish, so the overall numbers changed a bit from previous posts.
Below is a table with all the numbers:
Online Advertising Revenues (in millions)
| 3Q08 | 4Q08 | 1Q09 | 2Q09 | 3Q09 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $5,352 | $5,504 | $5,331 | $5,336 | $5,757 | |
| Yahoo | $1,563 | $1,594 | $1,383 | $1,378 | $1,377 |
| Microsoft | $520 | $610 | $520 | $540 | $490 |
| AOL | $507 | $507 | $443 | $419 | $415 |
| Total | $7,942 | $8,215 | $7,677 | $7,673 | $8,039 |
| Sequential Growth Q/Q | 3.44% | -6.55% | -0.05% | 4.77% | |
| Annual Growth Y/Y | 4.94% | -4.63% | -5.76% | 1.22% |
we should thanks to google.com and search engine for sending us a fresh traffic and make an advertiser placing ads on our website
Yes, although I have removed ads currently as no one wants to use them.
I do notice though that google has a limitless ads to display.
I wish to thank Google for that but unfortunatelly they didn’t give me the revenue on adds and is more than one year since I have been started using G adsense.
Good article. Q1 2010 will be even better
The effects of the financial crisis are slowly stopping, and will eventually reverse.
This is a recovery, alright.
The online advertising boom is back!!
I wonder what % of that money is from acai berry ads, and facebook games.
Personally, I wish analysts would stop lumping search advertising with all other digital advertising for this very reason: It skews the perception. While, yes, it’s all coming out of the same pocket, decision-making on how dollars get allocated to search versus other forms of online advertising (or, for that matter, other online marketing tactics) should be very different, as the expectations and outcomes are also very different.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a big supporter of both search advertising and “all other” digital advertising. It’s just hard enough without this to get advertisers to understand all the moving parts.