• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, July 25, 2013

On average, the top 1,000 brands are buying 23% of their online impressions via RTB -- and that share is growing fast -- according to a sneak peak to OMMA RTB attendees of soon-to-be-released findings from YieldMetrics.

“We should be about 30% of brand impressions going through RTB at this time next year,” noted Gabe Gotlieb, co-founder and CEO of YieldMetrics, during his research presentation at the OMMA event.

Speaking of the current market shares, which are based on data from only a few weeks ago, Gotlieb said 44% of the online display ad impressions are being purchased direct from publishers, while another 33% are being acquired through ad networks, though he implied there’s some blurring taking place between RTB and ad nets, which he will disclose in more detail later in his presentation.

Meanwhile, he provided another glimpse of the break down among the top 1,000 brands, showing that 70% are using RTB at least at some level, while 30% aren’t currently using it at all. If you add ad nets to the mix, the percentage using RTB/ad nets goes up to 94%.

So who’s not using RTB? Gotlieb showed some category data indicating its pretty stratified. The real estate category is only buying 5% of its online impressions through RTB, while the media category is procuring 16% -- the highest percentage of any category shown by Gotlieb. In other words, the savviest RTB marketers are media companies using RTB to buy their own media.