Google rules online advertising, but there's one area where it hasn't made too much inroad, not for lack of trying, display advertising. This is where Yahoo shines, and has always done so, and 2009 was no different. In terms of raw impressions (views), Yahoo had a strong lead in the US with 512 billion impressions. Coming in second, though with a significant gap, was Fox Interactive Media, aka MySpace, followed by up-and-comer Facebook.

The numbers come from a comScore report covering the Digital landscape in the US in 2009. The display market grew overall by 21 percent from 2008 with 4.3 trillion ads served. This was coupled with an 8 percent growth in the number of people actually viewing display ads. Despite Facebook's huge growth, Yahoo was still the king of display advertising, arguably its strongest market for quite a few years now. Impressions alone don't really tell that much about the kind of money the company makes, but it's safe to assume that Yahoo with about 12 percent of the entire display ad market is making the most money out of this as well.

MySpace managed to come in second despite its troubles lately. With 368 million impressions, the social network is comparable to Yahoo, but in terms of actual revenue it made significantly less money. Social networks get some of the worst ad rates on the web as the ads usually don't perform as well as on general interest sites. Social networks get a lot of pageviews devaluing impressions and also have less opportunities for contextual ads, at least using conventional techniques.

Facebook is the rising star in display advertising. It is now at number three when it comes to impressions, serving 330 billion ads in 2009, but its growth outpaces that of its top ten rivals. It suffers from the same problems as MySpace and other social networks, but it has been working on increasing the value of the ads. It also recently started managing its inventory itself rather than relying on Microsoft's ad network like until now.

The site has recently reached 400 million users worldwide and is catching up to Yahoo in pageview numbers, so 2010 should be a very strong year for Facebook when it comes to display ads. Google, in the meantime, is at a distant sixth place with only 70 billion display ads impressions indicating that search ads are still its safest bet for now. [via TechCrunch]