Online ad networks offer site publishers a big revenue opportunity, according to a January 2008 study conducted jointly by Attributor and Compete.
The companies looked at content monetization and user information across 68 million domains. DoubleClick and Google dominated overall market share capturing 35% and 34% of unique users, respectively.
"DoubleClick owns the head and Google owns the tail," said Attributor on its blog.
The company noted that Doubleclick had nearly half of the total market for ads on sites with more than a million monthly unique users. Google had more than 70% of the market for sites with less than 100,000 monthly unique users.
One of the ways in which online ad exchanges help marketers is by letting them place ads alongside different instances of a given article on the Web. Content is constantly being reprinted, copied and otherwise reused on multiple Websites.
The researchers found an average of 20 different copies of each article tracked, and more than half of the copies did not link back to the sites where the articles appeared first. The ad traffic exchanges track these multiple article editions and let ads be placed against all of them.
"The growth of various online ad networks and exchanges is helping both marketers and
publishers," said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer. "Exchanges help marketers make easier purchases across Website
categories and improve ad targeting, and they help publishers monetize pages that might have remained unsold or underpriced."
The ad-exchange universe includes most of the main portals—with Yahoo!’s RightMedia, Microsoft’s AdECN and Google’s
DoubleClick exchange—along with independents such as ContextWeb’s ADSDAQ and AdBrite.
eMarketer predicts that by 2010, at least a quarter of display ad spending will go through ad exchanges and networks.
A November 2007 report from IBM Global Business Services called “The End of Advertising as We Know It” said that “more than half of ad professionals polled by IBM expect that in the next five years open advertising exchanges (currently led by companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL) will take 30% of current revenues now commanded by traditional broadcasters and media.”