When Google raised concerns over a possible Microsoft-Yahoo merger, it may have just been the pot calling the kettle black. According to new stats released by Attributor, Google's acquisition of DoubleClick gives them a whopping 69% of the online advertising market share. This comes in the wake of news that Google saw 59.2 percent of all US searches in February.

Furthermore, DoubleClick has 48% share of sites with 1 million unique visitors per month, while Google enjoys a whopping 71.38% share of sites with less than 100,000 unique visitors per month.

MSN has a lot of work to do if it wants to catch Google, as Steve Ballmer has declared in recent months. Currently, they only have 9.86% of the total market share. Even adding Yahoo, with an 11.54% market share, they will only come in at 21.4%.

Attributor also shared telling statistics for content distribution. For every article Attributor tracks, there are an average of 20 copies published. 57% of copies do not contain links back to the author, and 64% of copies have ads on them. Most copies are published on sites with less than 1 million unique visitors.

Attributor analyzed 68 million domains for their ad-server crawls and compared it with unique user data from Compete.com.

Wall Street is acting with caution when it comes to Google based on months of reporting that the search engine giant's paid search clicks are declining. But Google insists that the click reductions are due to improvement in the quality of the ads, not because Google is somehow losing its luster.

The timing for this move may be poor, however. A Business Week article points out that some advertisers may be cutting their ad spend due to a slower economy.

Still, Google is smart to perform quality assurance. As any good search engine marketer knows, the answer lies in revenues, not clicks. Everyone wants their conversion ratio to be as low as possible, and Google is smart to keep their eye on providing quality for the user (both buyers and clickers). A temporary slowdown in growth is far better than ignoring a quality issue and seeing sustained declines down the road.

Q4 2007 revenues showed growth but came in just under Wall Street's expectations. This coincided with news of a slowdown in clicks. We won't see Q1 revenues until sometime next month, but that will give some insight into whether or not Google is on the right track.

One of the issues presenting itself after Google's new focus on quality search ads—CPC inflation, expected higher conversions, reported lower publisher payouts—is the question of which gets more bang for the buck, search or content ads?

read more