The New Number One In Banner Advertising Impressions: Facebook

comScore has announced a major change in the display advertising marketplace.

On the basis of counting impressions - that's the number of times display advertising has appeared on a site or network of site properties - there has been a changing of the guard at the top.

Since its launch in 1995, Yahoo! had held on to the largest market share of online display advertising.  That share was due in great part to Yahoo's leadership in impressions delivered.  In Q1 2010, the search giant served an estimated 132 million impressions.

But the social network Facebook for the first time surpassed Yahoo, serving an estimated 176 million impressions.  According to Jack Marshall at ClikZ:

Facebook's ad impressions have therefore grown by 52 percent versus Q4 2009, when it served around 115 million impressions. In the same period impressions on Yahoo sites dropped from 140 million to 132 million, and impressions on Microsoft, Fox Interactive Media, and AOL properties also dipped, quarter-over-quarter.

Year-over-year, Facebook apparently served 100 million more impressions in Q1 2010 than it did during Q1 2009, when it offered up just 70 million. Andrew Lipsman, senior director, industry analysis at comScore attributed the growth to increased use of the social network more widely. "We've seen increases in the number of visitors to the site, and also increased intensity of use which results in more pageviews," he said. "The increase in pageviews has been pretty consistent with the increase in ad impressions," he continued.

Of course, the numbers reveal little about how much revenue the site is generating in comparison to sites such as those owned by Yahoo, but it does demonstrate appetite from advertisers for Facebook's inventory. The fact that Facebook grew so dramatically while all other major display ad players lost out also suggests marketers may be directing some of their spend away from portals and towards the social networks as people spend more of their time there, and increasingly make it their first destination when spending time online.

It's a huge change, and another one in a very long series of indicators that as social media sites in total steadily march toward the one billion user mark, display advertisers have new opportunities as at least as monstrous as those raw numbers. The special benefits social networks provide for targeting and segmentation are going to put display advertising into ever more relevant contexts.  As long as advertisers have the workflow and tools to take advantage, the sky will remain the limit for effective display advertising.

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