Advertising Placements by Industry and Top Sponsored Links, April 2009

The industry breakdown of ad placements and unit types and top 25 companies placing sponsored links. The data are provided by Nielsen Online.

Methodology: Nielsen Online AdRelevance's Cloudprober technology tracks online advertising activity across over 2,000 sites and subsites.

Nielsen Online, AdRelevance service uses a proprietary methodology for estimating online advertising expenditures and only takes into account image-based technologies and advertising sold per CPM. Above data does not reflect house advertising activity, strategic partnerships between publishers and advertisers, or text units, paid search, sponsorships, email, units contained within applications (e.g., messengers and pre-rolls) or performance based advertising.

Definition of Terms

Standard Image/Text Link: Ads that are comprised of many components, typically both image and text beneath the images, all of which link to the same destination URL.

Standard Image: Animated or static image ads; GIF or JPEG file format-based ads. HTML ads are also classified under this category.

Sponsored Link: Text-based ads that often appear as a result of a keyword search either on a search engine or associated site. These ads are often displayed alongside natural search results but identified under specified headers (e.g., "Paid Sponsor", "Sponsored Link", "Sponsored Sites" or "Sponsored Results").