An article about the growing advertising revenues earned by the Internet’s largest sites, was recently featured on Tech Crunch. The top four companies in terms of web advertising were Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, who saw a combined Q4 growth of 10.2 percent, or $9 billion, last year. This was the second consecutive quarter of growth, a noteworthy figure given the Q1 and Q2 declines caused by the recession.

It is also noteworthy that gains were earned by all four companies — not just Google. This represents a strong indication that display advertising, not only search advertising, is stabilizing. Search advertising, however, is still producing the largest gains. Of the four companies, Microsoft saw the largest percentage of growth at 18.6 as their revenue is starting to count for something. But the other three companies were close behind, growing at least 11.5 percent.

The author, Erick Schonfeld, keeps tabs on these four companies each quarter as he sees their combined figures representing the state of the global ad market. The numbers include global advertising revenues and network revenues paid to affiliates through networks such as AdSense and Yahoo!. (Note: the numbers also include only the advertising portions of online revenues for Microsoft and AOL.

Here are the numbers:

via Erick Schonfeld @ Tech Crunch