NONE: World Wide Web ad revenues
World Wide Web ad revenues
Cliff Kurtzman (cliff.kurtzman_at_tenagra.com)
Wed, 4 Sep 1996 12:06:57 -0600
A PR Newswire release yesterday from Jupiter Communications indicated that
total World Wide Web ad revenue for the first half of 1996 was an estimated
$71.7 million. Some 600 Web sites offered ad space (according to the
release), yet the top ten collected 66 percent of all ad revenue. Twelve
publishers drew more than $1 million in the quarter. Fifty raised more than
$100,000.
Also according to the report most of the ad spending continued to come from
a relatively small number of advertisers in the second quarter, the top ten
accounting for 31 percent.
Jupiter tracks advertising on over 100 Web sites, which Jupiter estimates
collect 93 percent of all Web ad spending. It uses published rates in its
calculations and does not include money paid for listings in online
directories or space in online malls.
I'm curious what this list thinks of some of these numbers. Only 600 web
sites that offer advertising? 100 sites collect 93% of the advertising
dollars? Using published rates in the calculations and guesstimating the
number of ad placements seems a leap of faith at best, possibly not even
giving accurate results within a factor of 2. I know we were recently
surprised to see one of our sites that has never generated _any_ paid ad
sales turn up in a listing (PC Computing) of top money making sites that
was based on Jupiter's database. And another site that will bring in
several hundred thousand dollars this year in ad revenue was not even
listed in the PC Computing report.
Obviously contacting the web site operators and asking them what their
actual revenues are might produce more accurate results, but then again
most people might not want to disclose that information (I probably would
not, unless the data was not tied back to my sites). So is guesstimating
based on site inspections and published rates the best that can be done?
Is this the same thing done for estimating ad spending in print and
television?
--Cliff
Cliff Kurtzman
The Tenagra Corporation
http://www.tenagra.com/
713/480-6300
