comScore’s new traffic figures for May show Yahoo! (YHOO) maintaining a comfortable lead in total unique visitors over Time Warner (TWX), and Google (GOOG). Yahoo! had over 130 million unique visitors in the US, ahead of its two rivals who each came in at just above 120 million. Microsoft (MSFT) ranked fourth with 113 million.
The study raises the question once again as to why Google does so much better financially than the Yahoo! and Time Warner sites (which include AOL). The answer would appear to be targetting, The effective yield-per-page-view for the text ads on Google must be superior to the same ads on Yahoo! and AOL. The two web portals run dislay ads as well.
Another factor is that Yahoo! and AOL have huge numbers of "remainders", which are pages which have not been purchased in advance by advertisers. These pages are sold off at very low rates through networks including ValueClick and Advertising.com. Google’s text ad formula appears to work well enough so that it is not plagued by these low yield advertisers.
The numbers do, in fact, indicate that size is not always what matters, at least in terms of what advertisers will pay for.
Douglas A. McIntyre