14 DAY TRIAL // Like it or not, advertising is what fuels the web and, despite a growing number of people wanting to change that, it’s going to stay that way for some time to come. And it looks like they’re getting more elaborate as well as a new report from comScore shows that 40 percent of all online ads viewed in the US are Flash or other type of rich media ads. The report also claims resurgence in display advertising in the last few months.
“We’ve witnessed a strong resurgence in the display ad market over the past several months, with the number of impressions up 15 percent vs. year ago and average CPMs also continuing to rise,” Jeff Hackett, comScore SVP said. “One of the several drivers of strength in this market has been the innovation occurring with respect to ad units, as larger and more engaging creative ad formats are employed.”
Of the total number of display ads shown in May in the US, 59.6 percent of them were standard image ones. JPEG images were the most prevalent with 42.4 percent of the total number of display ads. GIFs are still somewhat popular with 14.1 percent of the market. Finally, PNG ads are rarely used and have 3.1 percent share.
Flash and other types of interactive ads accounted for most of the remaining market share with a 40.3 percent slice. Unfortunately, comScore hasn’t provided a breakdown of how many of those are pure Flash ads and how many are rich media ads.
Still, it does serve as an interesting argument in the Flash vs HTML5 dispute. Flash has been the standard for web animations for years and, while HTLM5 has a solid offering with the Canvas element as well as vector graphics support, Flash still has the upper hand. And there’s no sign that advertisers are starting to replace Flash with HTML5 or anything else. YouTube has also raised some compelling arguments on why it’s sticking with Flash for the time being.