Google’s long tail of advertising

According to a SEC filing, Google had 1 million advertisers in 2007 at an average spend of $16,000/each equaling $16.6 billion in revenue. Estimates put the number of advertisers now around 1.3 to 1.5 million. With that large number of advertisers, Google has a competitive advantage in contextually targeting them to searches and content, yielding higher click rates. Not to mention the increase in competitive bidding for a limited universe of popular keywords. Now, it would be very interesting to see — although this data is not publicly available — how those 1.3-1.5 million advertisers at $16,000 a pop divide out by local market.