Shortly after publishing my last rants on the strong concentration of global corporate control (see ‘Eye in the Sky‘), I came across this article on the Darren Herman blog.

Trying to figure out what the online media spend looks like, here is what he uncovered:

the digital media ad spend (search, display, mobile, etc) controlled by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and AOL is about $40.1B

According to a recent ZenithOptimedia press release, worldwide digital advertising accounted for about $64.03B. That means that those ‘five sisters’ mentioned above, in that order, account for more than 60% of the worlds digital media ad spend. Moreover,

Google generates approximately 364% more revenue from advertising than it’s next closest rival, Yahoo!

To push this inequity even further, if you look at the comments in Herman’s blog post, Jon Steinberg (the President of BuzzFeed), points to another staggering statistic: 75% of all advertising spend is controlled by four advertising networks: WPP, Omnicom, Publicis and Interpublic (see his Flickr image here).

I’ll keep this in mind the next time I will be talking with someone of things such as concentration and dominant position. Apparently, these concepts also apply to the business models ruling the Internet. Which is something more difficult to occupy than any Wall Street.