• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, April 14, 2010

Broadpoint AmTech has kicked off a new quarterly report looking at display advertising trends across four key Web properties: Yahoo, AOL, MSN and YouTube. The findings were based on tracking over the past few months. Here are the highlights:

Yahoo: Other than YouTube, had the highest percentage of homepage ads classified as purely for branding purposes, at about 33%.

AOL: Deemed by far the most creative of the traditional media sites (excluding YouTube) analyzed in terms of its willingness to use non-standard, "expandable" rich media advertisements, at almost 23% of the total homepage ads we came across.

YouTube: Media companies, not surprisingly, like YouTube. The telecom and media vertical accounted for almost half of the homepage ads encountered on YouTube, over twice the percentage for the next largest site in this category (AOL).

MSN: Leaned toward direct response advertisers. About 57% of the MSN homepage ads encountered in 1Q were direct-response based, the highest percentage of the four sites that we analyzed. It also had the lowest proportion of branding-focused ads, at 21%.