> I'd be far more interested in seeing analysis on this broken down by volume of dollars / revenue. We don't really need to filter companies that are solely or

> I'd be far more interested in seeing analysis on this broken down by volume of dollars / revenue. We don't really need to filter companies that are solely or primarily dependent on advertising. We can compare the entire amount of money spent on advertising (which is a superset of what we're really looking for) versus everybody else (which is just total revenue minus advertising revenue) to see it's not even close. One source[1] for global ad spending puts it at $467 billion (for 2010), I couldn't find more recent hard data but another[2] estimates it at $581 billion for this year. Let's assume the estimate was right and round up to $600 billion. WalMart had revenue of $476.3 billion last year[3]. You can combine WalMart and any other company in the top 10 of Fortune's Global 500 and their combined revenue would exceed total advertising revenue[4]. The combined revenue of all 500 is $31.1 trillion[5], even if that included every penny of ad revenue it would still be a ratio of 50:1 [1] http://www.wpp.com/wpp/press/2011/dec/05/groupm-forecasts-global-ad-spending-to/ http://www.wpp.com/wpp/press/2011/dec/05/groupm-forecasts-gl... [2] http://www.statista.com/statistics/237797/total-global-advertising-revenue/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/237797/total-global-adver... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_Global_500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_Global_500 [5] http://fortune.com/global500/wal-mart-stores-1/ http://fortune.com/global500/wal-mart-stores-1/