The impressionist art movement is pretty much holding steady this century, but the art of serving online ad impressions is in the midst of a boom. Threadwatch points out a MediaPost article that says 185 billion display ads were purchased in March…almost twice the number bought in March 2005 (97.1 billion). The numbers come from Nielsen/NetRatings AdRelevance, which recorded an even more, uh, impressive one month increase of 44 billion ads served between February and March of this year.
Email accounted for a whopping 42.6 percent of the action, with Yahoo! Mail alone making up a staggering 30.3 percent (up from only 7.8 percent a year ago) and Hotmail filling in most of the rest at 10 percent. The white hot MySpace also made a big jump over last year, from 3.8 to 15.6 percent of all ads served – hmm, we wonder how much of that occured after Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp took MySpace in, although we suspect it’s too early to factor their recent security push into the mix.
Meanwhile, ads serviced through search and portals made up a relatively slim 9.2 percent piece of the overall pie, but the article notes that the Nielsen’s report “doesn’t include in the data ads served on proprietary America Online pages, accessed only by AOL subscribers.” Of course, we’re just talking about volume here. Threadwatch wants to know – and so do we – about the click-through rates. Are all these new impressions leading to better conversions?
It is good news on the growth of the volume.
While we don’t know yet what the conversion rates are in proportion to the increased volume, I know that whatever they are, this is still phenomenal growth, and the bottom line is not only statistics, but ROI.