I found the headline on this article at Adotas’ to be amusing: “Advertising.com Beats Yahoo! In Reach”.
The article refers to the November Comscore numbers for Ad Networks that has Advertising.com hitting 86% of the US internet audience, while the Yahoo! Ad Network hits 85% of the audience. So while the headline is certainly true, I’m not sure Advertising.com finishing at the top is the most interesting part of the numbers.
Advertising.com has been on the top of these numbers for a while, but this is the first month that the Yahoo! Ad Network has actually been listed in the numbers, and it finished barely second right out of the gate. Also it’s notable that Google’s legendary ad network is in third with the number of users it reaches in the US, and that a Yahoo!-owned Blue Lithium network is in 4th hitting 74 percent of the market.
As the Yahoo! Ad Network begins to start getting aggressive on off-Yahoo! properties such as their relationships with eBay and Comcast and recent deals with Forbes.com, WebMD, Ziff Davis, and Cars.com, it seems likely to me that Yahoo! will take over the top spot here and own the 1st and 4th largest ad networks on the web. That’s going to be a story worth telling soon.