August’s Most Surprising News – MySpace Serves More Ads Than Yahoo!

Yes, you read that correctly… since their income-driven site redesign in June, MySpace has begun surpassing Yahoo in number of ads delivered. According to eBrandz.com Search Marketing & Technology News reporting on the comScore announcement:

“Yahoo Inc. lost its position in the U.S. marketplace for online display advertising to MySpace, which has served 56.8 billion ads 15.2% of the display ads on the Internet, while Yahoo recorded in at 53.1 billion display ads with a 14.2% share.”

While Yahoo earns more revenue, due to more expensive CPM, MySpace pages get loaded virtally non-stop, 24-7 by an highly wired generation who can’t go an hour without checking email… this is why there’s been a recent influx of major nationwide, even global advertisers, like Wendys, Sprint, Verizon, and Sony. Another interesting market quote:

“…even as the data indicates speedy growth of MySpace in terms of advertising viewer-ship, analysts say the social network site has struggled to draw top-dollar ad rates relative to Yahoo, known for attracting premium advertising rates.”

In plain English, this means MySpace is cheaper than Yahoo. Keep in mind, these are display ads – not text ads – so we’re not talking about any major pay per click upheaval. But we are talking about the fact that an “infant” of a web site, in terms of the relative age of Yahoo, is serving such a massive number of display ads and they continue to be relatively inexpensive as well.

However, all may not be well in fairly-tale MySpace land. As its core usership matures, many analysts expect these users to migrate to more useful and less offensive social portals, like Facebook, Twitter, possibly even to Yahoo’s My Yahoo webmail interface. MySpace is designed to throw as many ads as possible in front of its users in a spam-like way that some critics say it typical of the 90’s style “more hits = more money” mentality that just doesn’t work anymore. I tend to agree. In then end, the advertisers will determine whether or not this ad medium actually works or not. However, it seems fairly obvious that the Web 2.0 generation of social networking sites are indeed an advertising force waiting to be reckoned with.