Skip to main content

Exposing Online Ad User Segmentation Data

ComScore announced the introduction of their Ad Metrix Publisher, a new service that provides insight into the online advertising landscape by reporting where display ads are actually viewed across the Internet -- and the characteristics of the people who are exposed to them.

Ad Metrix Publisher captures all types of display advertising, including static and rich media or interactive ads, for the U.S. market.

"comScore Ad Metrix Publisher, the inaugural service from our Ad Metrix product suite, is the first online advertising measurement service to accurately account for the number of ads displayed and tie those views to actual Web users," said Alistair Sutcliffe, vice president of comScore Advertising Solutions.

Understanding the reach, frequency and audience composition for an online advertising plan is vital information for any media planner. Ad Metrix provides the tools for optimizing the placement of online ad dollars, thereby fulfilling the promise of the Internet to deliver greater media accountability.

To illustrate the impact of understanding who's viewing online ads, comScore utilized the Ad Metrix Publisher service to analyze the share of display ads viewed by various demographics across three competitive sports Web sites -- ESPN, Fox Sports on MSN, and Yahoo! Sports. The results of the study revealed several notable differences among the sites.

While the three sites had similar ratios of males to females viewing display ads on the sites, they exhibited different skews by age and household income.

Display ads on ESPN reached the highest share of people age 35-44 (28.6 percent) and households with an income of at least $100,000 (34.7 percent). Display ads on Fox Sports on MSN skewed heavily towards people age 45 and older (39.7 percent) and households earning between $40,000-$59,999 (31.7 percent).

Meanwhile, Yahoo! Sports fared the best at capturing the 18-34 year old demographic, with 36.5 percent of its ads reaching people in that age group.

A deeper dive into the 18-34 year old demographic revealed that Yahoo! Sports delivered the most ads to this demographic, capturing the highest share among the three sites (53.5 percent). Although advertising for all three sites reached a similar percentage of viewers within this segment, Yahoo Sports delivered about twice as many ad views.

Popular posts from this blog

The Billions Bet on Tentative AI Demand

Gartner's latest worldwide IT spending forecast exposes a trend every CIO has already felt in budget negotiations. Total spending will climb 14.2 percent in 2026, reaching $6.37 trillion. It seems that the IT infrastructure market is simply having a strong year. However, the more useful insight is how unevenly that growth is distributed. The Headline Number vs. The Real Story Data center systems and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are absorbing capital at a pace several multiples faster than devices, communications services, and traditional IT services. This is not incremental growth spread across a healthy portfolio. It is a wholesale reallocation of enterprise technology budgets toward AI infrastructure, made on the expectation that demand for AI workloads will justify the outlay before that demand has been fully proven. Where the Money is Going Data center systems are forecast to grow 62.5 percent in 2026, that's up from 51.6 percent growth in 2025, reaching $822 billion....