Even though online advertising by businesses targeting families and children grew steadily through the first quarter of this year, advertisers wanting to reach kids online are shifting their focus
away from children and on to families.
The latest AdRelevance Intelligence Report says online advertising by businesses targeting families grew 96% between May 2000 and August 2000,
while advertising by companies targeting children declined 56% in the same period.
After analyzing standard 468x60 banner ad campaigns of 183 child and family-focused online advertisers
between January 2000 and August 200, AdRelevance found that a majority of ad impressions for child and family-focused online advertisers run on relatively few kinds of sites - portals, kids and
family sites. With only 4.6% fewer online ad impressions, child and family sites are almost as popular as portals for child-focused advertisers. Among family-focused advertisers, however, the child
and family genre is a distant second to portals, hosting 22.5% fewer banner impressions.
These findings suggest that child-focused advertisers concentrate their impressions on fewer sites than
do advertisers targeting the family audience, the report states.
While the most popular portals for child-focused advertisers are MSN (13.62% share of impressions), Netscape (12.97%) and
Yahoo! (8.43%), family-focused advertisers prefer Yahoo! (27.07% share of impressions), AOL.com (12.28%), Go.com (6.92%) and Altavista (5.35%).
Additionally, television, entertainment and
movie advertisers account for 30% of all impressions on kids and family sites, while department stores, pet supply vendors and toy retailers account for a combined 19% of impressions, suggesting
that building retail opportunities among the child and family audiences is important to advertisers.