By now, the Web's four biggest players--Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL--have all reported fourth quarter earnings, so TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld combined their numbers in order to give us a decent
proxy for the health of the greater online advertising industry, as the big four account for the majority of online advertising revenues.
Surprisingly, after a full year of declining
growth, their combined ad revenues actually gained 3% in the fourth quarter as compared to the third. This is interesting, because sequential growth ground to a halt from the second to third quarters.
Says Schonfeld: "What the slight rebound in growth tells us is that search advertising may be making up for the continued weakness in display advertising, which each of these companies acknowledged in
their conference calls." The question now is whether search growth can propel sequential growth even higher for the rest of this year.
All together, the Web giants brought in $8.5 billion
in revenues in the fourth quarter, up from $8.2 billion in the third quarter and $7.8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007. Google, which contributed slightly more than half the growth, accounted for
65% of those revenues, up from 61% from a year ago but slightly down from its 65.3% share in the third quarter. Yahoo had a 19.1% share of revenues, while Microsoft had a 10.2% share, and AOL, a 6.0%
share.
Read the whole story at TechCrunch »