• by Masha Geller , May 11, 2001

All seems to be quiet on the advertising media front today. This calm before the storm could have something to do with the TV upfront starting on Monday. Suffice it to say that the next few weeks will be a good indication of whether these recession rumors hold any water.

Of course, the online industry will be both directly and indirectly affected, so for better or for worse, here are some numbers. The Internet ratings report for the week ending May 6 from Nielsen//NetRatings shows that overall, AOL Time Warner web properties reign supreme with both at-home and at-work web users, followed by Yahoo!, MSN, Microsoft and Lycos.

Top advertisers at home, ranked by banner impressions, are Microsoft, TRUSTe, Amazon, Yahoo! and eBay. At work, the top five are TRUSTe, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Ebates and Amazon.

According to NetRatings, 34.7 million people logged on to the web from their office computers an average of 12 times a week, for about 30 minutes each time (just over 6 hours total). During that time, they visited about 14 sites, or 33 pages, spending 56 seconds on each page. NetRatings calculated that the average at-work click rate for top banners was at .16% last week, which is up 33.3% from the week before.

Comparatively, NetRatings found that the at-home active Internet user base is more than double that of at-work - 74.2 million, but at-home users visited an average of just 6 sites and spent half as much time online - about 3 hours total. The at-home click rate for top banners was at .23% last week, which is up 9.5% from the week before.