Financial services companies accounted for 30% of October ads--up from 21% last year and 28% in September, according to new data by Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance.
Web media were
the second-largest category of online advertiser, with 17% of impressions, followed by retail goods and services (16%), telecoms (10%), and public services (9%).
E-mail sites accounted for the
majority of impressions--51.1%--with Yahoo's e-mail service garnering 43.6% of ads, and MSN Hotmail claiming 6.3%, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. General community sites drew 16.8% of impressions;
MySpace alone accounted for 15.9%--making the company the second most popular with online advertisers.
Portals and search engines garnered 7.7% of impressions, followed by general/national news
sites (3.9%), sports/recreation sites (2.9%), entertainment sites (2.7%), finance sites (2.5%), local/regional sites (2.1%), games (1.4%), and weather sites (1.3%).
The overall number of
cost-per-thousand impression display ads tracked by Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance totaled 254.2 billion last month, up from 232.1 billion in September. The measurement company doesn't track certain
types of online advertising, including pre-roll, partnerships, and sponsorships. The AdRelevance data also doesn't include ads served on proprietary AOL pages, but counts ads that appear on AOL pages
accessed via the Web.