• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, September 19, 2005

Summer is usually seen as slow for advertising, but the number of online display impressions soared to a whopping 112.1 billion last month--up almost 9 percent from July, according to new data from Nielsen//NetRatings' AdRelevance.

August marked the fifth consecutive month of increases in the number of impressions served. Advertisers served 102.9 billion impressions in July--compared to 97.1 billion in June, 93.1 billion in May, and 91.4 billion in April.

Also last month, MySpace's popularity with marketers continued to surge. Of all display impressions, 12.4 percent were on MySpace--nearly double the 6.3 percent share of ads commanded by the site in May.

Yahoo! Mail accounted for 7.6 percent of online impressions, while MSN Hotmail accounted for 6.6 percent. Both of those figures are down from a year ago--when Yahoo! Mail garnered 7.8 percent of impressions, and Hotmail accounted for 8.3 percent.

Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance doesn't include in the data ads served on proprietary America Online pages, accessed only by AOL subscribers, but counts ads that appear on AOL pages accessed via the Web.

Financial services ads accounted for 22 percent of impressions last month, up from 20 percent in August 2004. Web media slid to 18 percent of impressions, from 21 percent a year ago. Retail goods and services accounted for 16 percent of impressions, up from 14 percent last year. Telecommunications ads represented 9 percent of online impressions, up from 8 percent one year ago; and public services were responsible for 9 percent of impressions, up from 6 percent last year.