Total spending in digital advertising in the US was $72.5 billion in 2016 per the advertising revenue report released by the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) based on a study by PwC. In 2015 the total spending on digital advertising in the US was $59.6 billion which means that in 2016, advertisers spent 21.8% more on digital advertising than what they did in 2015.
In keeping with the trend, spending on mobile increased by a remarkable 15 percentage points in 2016 as compared to spending in 2015. Spending on mobile was $36.6 billion in 2016 accounting for 50.5% of the total expenditure on digital advertising; in 2015 the spending on mobile was $20.7 billion accounting for about 35% of spending on digital advertising.
David Doty, EVP and CMO at IAB, said, “Mobile is the driving force in digital media and marketing throughout 2016, and that’s because of a simple reason: Consumers are on their phones, their mobile devices all the time, so marketers with their brand dollars are following them.”
Over the last couple of years, the bulk of this money has gone into the coffers of 10 leading companies. There has been no official communication about any of these 10 companies and neither has IAB disclosed their identities. However, it is common knowledge that Google and Facebook along with a few other leading social networking and ecommerce sites are the preferred platforms for digital advertising and it’s not difficult to figure out why this is so. These are huge platforms with millions and billions of people actively using them every day. In fact it has been confirmed by a report from eMarketer that most of the digital advertising dollars go to sites like Google and Facebook and on a smaller scale, to sites like Yahoo, Twitter, Snapchat and Amazon.
According to the IAB report, “Despite the emergence of a few heavyweights in internet advertising publishing, the concentration of top 10 revenues have remained relatively unchanged over the past 10 years, fluctuating between 69 percent and 75 percent.”