Google and Facebook will continue to duke it out over the top spot in the display ad market. Mark Zuckerberg’s social network remains one of the main competitive risks to Google’s absolute dominance of the Internet.
“Facebook has posed serious problems for Google, most notably by walling off the social network’s content from Google’s search engine,” explained Baird’s equity research analysts in a note on Friday.
The problem, for Google, is that its business model relies on its ability to “index the web.” Thus, when Facebook walls-off its site, it’s essentially blocking a significant, and growing, portion of the web. “Google’s index has been faced with an ever-increasing blind spot for search,” wrote the analysts.
Google remains the undisputed king of the Internet. It clearly dominates search advertising, with over 65% of the U.S. market and more than 50% of the global market (Yahoo has 16% share in the U.S. whileMicrosoft’s Bing has been growing fast and now accounts for 14%). It has one of the fastest growing mobile operating systems, Android, where its share is even larger than in PCs and growing faster thanApple’s iOS. In 2012, Google will rake in more than $36 billion in revenue.
But Facebook is creeping up. Mark Zuckerberg’s social network has risen to become the second most important online property, behind Google. Facebook reaches about 43% of the web over the last three months, according to Alexa, and counts with more than 5% of global page views. It makes the difference in engagement, though: users spend an average of 24 minutes and 45 seconds on Facebook, compared with 11 minutes and 52 seconds on Google.
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