Yahoo: Doggone It, People Really Like Us!

Yahoo has conducted some rather self-serving research in conjunction with ComScore and Media Contacts that concludes the obvious: most consumers care intensely about only a small number of websites, and it’s these websites that make for the best places to advertise.

After analyzing over 12 million “passively observed site-user paired data points” from ComScore and surveying 800 users, the report came up with the following statistics:

  • People visit on average 85 sites over the course of a month; they are “deeply engaged” with only about 1.5 of them
  • People visit these 1.5 sites almost every day they go online
  • People have been visiting these 1.5 sites for approximately 4.5 years
  • People spend more than 1/3 of their time online at these 1.5 sites
  • People are 13% more willing to pay attention to ads, and 200% as likely to find trustworthy information, at these 1.5 sites

The report calls these 1.5 sites “starting points” and asserts that they can be “portals or homepages or search engines”. So let’s see here…portals, homepages, search engines…at least 4.5 years…what the goodness could they could be referring to? Oh yea, Yahoo.

Since people are “13 percent more likely to pay attention to ads in ‘starting points’ versus ‘non-starting points'” and “deep engagement with content can lead to deeper engagement in advertising,” the report implies that sites like Yahoo are “ideal location[s] to reach [people] with targeted messages”. The take home message: consumers love Yahoo so advertise to them there.

You gotta love these unbiased, scientific studies.