A new e-Marketer report shows that top search portals like Yahoo and AOL are not as relevant as they once were, but are still crucial for many marketers.
The report, available here, uses information from Experian Hitwise, which shows that eight out of ten of the most-visited sites in the US were part of a search portal. Furthermore, e-Marketer estimates that a significant 57 percent of US online ad spending will be sunk into these search portals this year.
When e-Marketer studied the net revenues from companies that pay traffic acquisition costs to partner sites in March, 2010, it found that ad spending on search portals was expected to go up by 2011, but not significantly (the percentage is expected to increase only by 0.2 percent by 2011).
Not surprisingly, a massive percentage of this online ad spend on portals will go to the major players, namely Google and Yahoo. For its part, Google is the only one gaining market share. Google’s advertising revenues are expected to reach well over $9 billion USD by 2011, while Yahoo is more likely to lose ad revenues, from $3,104,000 in 2009, to $3,084,000 in 2011. Microsoft is expected to make a very modest gain, and it’s predicted that AOL will lose a significant amount of market share in this arena. The majority of the revenues are generated through paid search advertising, rather than display ads.
David Hallerman, e-Marketer’s senior analyst says that advertisers view online search portals as being similar to broadcast television.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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Tags: e-Marketer, search portals
