Google maintained its search market share in November. The news has given new life to talks of Microsoft making acquisitions to rival Google.
Google owns 57 percent of the ad-server market, according to content-tracking firm Attributor’s December 18 report. Microsoft and Yahoo combined have only 15 percent. That means even if Microsoft and Yahoo agree to merge their search-advertising businesses, the combination would not come close to displacing Google on the ad-serving front — at least not in the short term.
Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, doesn’t expect to see a significant shakeup in those numbers, either. “I don’t see how Microsoft could immediately catch up,” he said. “Microsoft could acquire some smaller firms, but that wouldn’t do a great deal, and I don’t think Microsoft has an incentive to make smaller acquisitions just to get boosted share in the ad-serving market.”
When examining these numbers, analysts said it’s important to bear in mind that the data refers only to ad serving. Display advertising is not included in the analysis. If Microsoft and Yahoo were to do a full merger, the company would be positioned to compete more effectively with Yahoo on the overall advertising front, thanks to Yahoo’s strong position in display advertising. Yahoo has 10.5 percent of the display market, according to comScore, while Google has only 1.5 percent.
Yahoo and Microsoft Lose Ground
“Our analysis of ad server calls across 75 million domains shows that both Yahoo and Microsoft lost significant share compared to our March report and now make up less than 15 percent of the total market,” the Attributor report said.
Google gained a marked advantage with the DoubleClick acquisition. DoubleClick led the ad-server pack with 30.7 percent of the market, while Google’s popular AdSense gained 25.8 percent.
According to the Attributor report, Google’s AdSense is dominant on…