14 DAY TRIAL // While Facebook is on track to become the largest website on the planet, its revenue is not on par with its size. But things are improving and fast. The latest report from comScore shows that Facebook is now the largest provider of display ads in the US and by a huge margin.
"Popular social networking site Facebook.com led all online publishers in Q3 2010 with 297 billion display ad impressions, representing 23.1 percent market share," comScore said.
"Facebook’s market share has increased 13.9 percentage points from 9.2 percent in Q3 2009. Yahoo! Sites ranked second during the most recent quarter with 140 billion impressions (11.0 percent), followed by Microsoft Sites with 64 billion impressions (5.0 percent) and Fox Interactive Media with 48 billion impressions (3.8 percent)," it continued.
The display advertising market is seeing big growth in the US, spurred perhaps by the slowly recovering economy. The market grew 22 percent in the past year, with 1.3 trillion display ads served in the US in the third quarter of 2010 compared to a little over 1 trillion in the same period in 2009.
Note that this is just market volume that the report is underlining, not revenue. While Facebook may now be accounting for a large share of the market, its ad rates are typically lower than those of its competitors.
Still, the social network is estimated to bring in $2 billion in revenue this year, a significant boost over the previous one.
Google is also seeing strong growth in display ads, something it has been struggling with for a few years now. Of course, its share of the display ad market is significantly smaller than Facebook's.
Google is the fifth largest provider of display ads in the US and is now bigger than AOL a once big player in the market.