Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Digital Advertising Landscape




As a result of higher internet penetration, increased usage of smartphones and the proliferation of the user-generated content digital advertising have started to play a key role in the advertising market. The digitization of the customer decision journey has further increased the competition in the industry since buyers are consulting the digital channels more than ever now. Hence companies currently engage in a broad spectrum of digital channels such as search engine advertising, banner ads, email campaigns, social media and video games, to name a few, to get the attention of their customers.   

The digital market was sized at $49.5b in 2014, as the total online revenue, and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 11.3% to reach $103b, according to Forrester Research. The biggest driver of this growth will be fueled by mobile ads. Mobile advertising revenue in the US rose by 76% alone to $19Bn which comprised 25% of the overall digital advertising market. Within the mobile advertising market the biggest revenue drivers were Search and Display ads at 45% and 51%. Non-mobile advertising compromised of search ads, display ads and the online videos as the biggest revenue drivers at 37%, 16% and 7% for 2014 according to PWC. From revenue by pricing model perspective, 66% of the market revenue came from the performance based ads (where the purchaser only pays when there are measurable results) followed by cost per thousand impression ads (where the purchaser pays each time an ad is displayed).

With billions of online users the advertising market is very much concentrated with the top 10 leading companies bringing in the 70% of the revenues for 2014. Google (64%), Bing (20%), Yahoo (12%) are the leading players in the search engine business whereas Facebook (24%), Google (13%) and Twitter (5%) as the leading display ad businesses, according to emarketer.

Even though Facebook continues to be the leader in the display ad business and Google being the dominant force in the search ad industry, Google is trying to undercut Facebook by increasing the reach for users to its online video contents on YouTube, hence increasing its viewership. The increased viewership is critical for Google’s ad revenue. Google is also trying to explore other avenues as well through its Google glass or through increasing its reach into the untapped regions of the world.

Facebook on the other hand is using new ad formats such as in-stream ads (ads that displays commercials before, during or after an internet video). With over 200mm active users within North America Facebook is well positioned to be one of the leaded in display ad market. Social networks are becoming the major source of prioritizing or selecting videos and as a result the video viewership on Facebook surged to 4bn from 1bn a year ago. Hence there will be a tough competition between the Facebook online video viewership vs. the YouTube viewership.

 

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