According to ComScore, MySpace (or Fox Interactive Media) has surpassed Yahoo in terms of displaying advertisements, serving 56.8 billion ads 15.2% of the display ads on the Internet, while Yahoo weighed in at 53.1 billion display ads with a 14.2% share.
This is however, a bit of a misleading statistic. Sure it is amazing that MySpace is serving more display ads than Yahoo now, although MySpace advertisements generally are not monetized or targeted as well as Yahoo’s, with Yahoo ad rates being sold at 5 times that of MySpace.
MySpace’s design, as ugly as sin as it is, is meant to be a mess of a multi-click site, surfing from page to page to get anything done while being served up to 6 display ads per page. Sending a personal message in MySpace can take up to 6 clicks and loads of new pages, each serving numerous ads to the end user. If anything, since MySpace was originally developed by an email spamming company, the site was more or less developed with a 1998 web surfing mentality, more hits = more money.
Looking at Yahoo or even Facebook, the communication process within these sites is more streamlined and user friendly.
Needless to say, the study is still disturbing to Yahoo and a win for Fox Interactive Media. Yahoo has had such a grip on the pageview and ad serving marketplace for years, and those flagship stats are being taken away by Yahoo competitors in Google & MySpace. This is not a good placement for Yahoo to lose, especially when its stock is extremely low and the world is just waiting for the company to be acquired or establish a joint venture with another Internet powerhouse such as AOL.
Let’s also keep in mind that a lot of Yahoo ad serving is done on third party sites via the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium partnerships and Yahoo Buzz ad serving agreements.
For what its worth, looking at Alexa stats, Yahoo pageviews and usage still trump the social networks, and with MySpace ad stuffing their already cluttered interface, if anything there should be a migration of MySpace users over to Facebook as the MySpace generation matures.
Still, Yahoo beware, the latest ComScore numbers are not going to fair well with stock holders or advertisers.
