State of the digital ad address: Who is the new key player in digital marketing?

It is vital that most companies, regardless of industry, size, or revenue, include digital advertising in their marketing and ad budgets every year. The revenue generated by digital marketing, the return on investment on your marketing budget, has been growing annually. It is estimated that combined expenditure on U.S. digital display ads will surpass $27 billion this year. By 2017 it’s predicted to grow to $37 billion.

Currently, Facebook is the heavyweight here, comprising 25.2 percent of revenue in this market in 2015. Facebook’s aggressive expansion into the pay-to-play digital ad space will continue to make this platform a leader in this market. Its market share growth is expected to increase to 29 percent, which will generate $6.82 billion for Facebook. Twitter’s market share is growing at roughly the same speed as that of Facebook, which translates into a revenue increase of more than 60 percent.

On the other hand, major tech companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft are expected to lose market share and revenue in the next few years. Google’s market share is predicted to drop by 3.3 percent from 2013 to 2017. Yahoo is in worse shape with a 3.7 percent loss, while AOL appears to get off somewhat easy with a 1.1 percent drop. Microsoft is predicted to lose 2.7 percent of its market share.

Proving again that we are in the mobile age, revenue from advertising targeted to desktop browsers will drop slightly while mobile ad revenues go through the roof. Desktop ad revenues were around $12.5 billion last year, and in 2017 they are expected to bring in only $11.7 billion. In the same time, mobile will jump from $9.7 billion to $25.7 billion. That’s an increase of more than 260 percent.

It is clear that in the next few coming years, the companies that invest in digital advertising, particularly mobile advertising, will dominate the market. On the other side, digital platforms like Google and Yahoo want to stay relevant in the market, they will have to invest in better mobile ad capabilities as soon as possible.