comScore: 10% of Display Local/Geo

From comScore this morning:

The study found that between 9 and 11 percent of display ads in the four markets among all publisher sites were locally targeted. San Francisco (11 percent) and Washington D.C. (11 percent) had a relatively higher share of ads being locally targeted, while Atlanta (10 percent) and Chicago (9 percent) were slightly lower. Not surprisingly, in the regional/local site category – which includes sites like Yahoo! Local, Citysearch and Yelp – the share of display ads that were locally targeted was substantially higher at between 23-33 percent among the four markets.

And now for some crude math:

Using the IAB numbers . . . if online display advertising represents 22% of online ad revenues ($23 billion) that’s $5.06 billion. Ten percent of that would be just over $500 million. This is probably low. But that’s the crude math.

I spoke to comScore this morning about the methodology and here’s what they said:

There was no manual review of ad copy. They also didn’t capture which ads were IP targeted. The way they determined local or geotargeted advertising was by estimating the percentage of ads that would appear normally in the particular DMA they were examining. Then they compared that to the actual percentage of ads appearing in that DMA. If there was a higher percentage of ads than the normal average in the DMA they assumed those ads were geotargeted.

There’s ambiguity and under-counting here to be sure but it starts to get at very interesting data.

Any thoughts?

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