So go panning

Publishers have potentially vast opportunities to collect revenue from ad networks and content licensing, according to an Attributor analysis of content monetization across 68 million domains (via MarketingCharts).

Ad calls from the domains were captured in Jan. '08 from Attributor's crawling operations and joined with unique user data from Compete to determine market share numbers:

Ad Server Market Share, Jan. '08

Ad Server Market Share Grouped by Site Traffic, Jan. '08

Key findings:

• DoubleClick and Google dominate overall market share, capturing 35 percent and 34 percent of unique users, respectively.
• Yahoo, in the No. 3 position, captured only 12 percent.
• Broken down by monthly unique users…
  • Doubleclick dominates sites with over one million monthly unique users, capturing 48 percent of the market share, three times as much as No. 2-ranked Yahoo.
  • Google captured 71 percent of sites with less than 100k monthly users - eight times that of No. 2-ranked MSN.
  • Google also dominates the middle group (100k-1MM), taking 42 percent of market share.

  Professionally produced content is spread across highly trafficked, commercial sites, Attributor said.

  Average Domain Traffic by Match Levels

  

  Finding an average of 20 different copies for each tracked article, Attributor further noted that…

  • Fully 64 percent of the articles have ads on their pages.
  • Most republishing is on sites with less than one million monthly unique users.
  • A good portion (57 percent) of the copies do not link back to the original sites.

  About the data: Attributor took a snapshot of ad server distribution across 68 million domains in Jan. '08 and combined it with unique user data from Compete. Less than 5 percent of the domains contained more than one ad server call; in these cases, domain traffic was associated with each ad network found. De-duplication of unique user numbers was not attempted.