Yahoo! leads Web advertising with 152pc revenue surge

Web advertising revenue grew to US$597.1 million last year, up 152.6 per cent over the $236.4 million spent in 1996, according to a report.

Yahoo! was the top ad-supported site for the second successive year, at $53.2 million, up 180 per cent from $19 million in 1996, the Electronic Advertising & Marketplace Report said.

Second-ranking Excite narrowed the gap on Yahoo!, largely from buying WebCrawler from America Online last year. Excite generated $40.2 million in advertising revenue for the year.

Yahoo!, Excite and WebCrawler all are directories or search engines for the Internet.

'Despite the call from many advertisers for more targeted marketing, the search engines remain almost a default buy among Web advertisers because they consistently offer the largest audience at one Web location,' editor Matthew Kinsman said..

Web advertising revenue grew from $84 million in the first quarter of last year to $210 million in the fourth.