Digital Advertising Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Elena Rodriguez | Last updated: August 14, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
U.S. internet advertising revenue reached $294.6 billion in 2025, a 13.9% increase reported by IAB and PwC in April 2026. Five public platforms disclosed $162.8 billion of advertising revenue in the June 2026 quarter alone — and Axis Intelligence Research finds that two of them captured 83.6% of every incremental dollar that panel added year over year.
Quick Answer
The U.S. digital advertising market generated $294.6 billion in 2025 (+13.9% YoY), per the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report published April 16, 2026. Globally, WPP Media projects $1.3 trillion in 2026 advertising revenue. Axis Intelligence Research’s Platform Advertising Concentration Index (PACI™) reads 86.6 as of the quarter ended June 30, 2026 — the share of disclosed public-platform advertising revenue held by Alphabet and Meta combined.
Key Findings
- U.S. internet advertising revenue totaled $294.6 billion in 2025, up 13.9% year over year, according to the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report released April 16, 2026.
- Digital video revenue grew 25.4% to $78.0 billion in 2025 — and Axis Intelligence Research finds video absorbed 43.9% of the $36.0 billion the U.S. market added that year while holding just 26.5% of the base.
- Axis Intelligence Research’s Platform Advertising Concentration Index (PACI™) reads 86.6 for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, down 0.6 points from 87.2 a year earlier.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that Alphabet and Meta together captured 83.6% of the $27.6 billion in incremental advertising revenue added by the five-company Axis Digital Advertising Panel between Q2 2025 and Q2 2026.
- Google Network — Alphabet’s open-web ad line — was the only advertising line in the panel to shrink, falling about 1% to $7.303 billion in Q2 2026 per Alphabet’s SEC filing.
How Big Is the Digital Advertising Market in 2026?
Two numbers answer this question, and they measure different things. Conflating them is the most common error in secondary coverage.
The U.S. figure comes from the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, which has surveyed companies selling internet advertising since 1996 and is compiled by PwC Advisory Services from data reported directly by sellers plus public corporate disclosures. For full-year 2025 it puts U.S. internet advertising revenue at $294.6 billion, a 13.9% increase over 2024’s $258.6 billion.
The global figure comes from a forecast, not a survey. WPP Media’s This Year Next Year 2026 Global Midyear Forecast, published June 16, 2026, projects global advertising revenue excluding U.S. political spending will grow 8.9% in 2026 to $1.3 trillion — an upward revision from the 7.1% the same team forecast in December 2025.
One is a backward-looking measurement of a single national market. The other is a forward-looking projection of a global one. Axis Intelligence Research reports both and does not blend them, because a survey-based actual and a model-based forecast do not share a denominator.
U.S. Internet Advertising Revenue by Year, 2021–2025
| Year | Revenue (US$ bn) | YoY growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 189.3 | 35% | IAB/PwC, FY2025 report |
| 2022 | 209.7 | 10.8% | IAB/PwC, FY2025 report |
| 2023 | 225.0 | 7.3% | IAB/PwC, FY2025 report |
| 2024 | 258.6 | 14.9% | IAB/PwC, FY2025 report |
| 2025 | 294.6 | 13.9% | IAB/PwC, FY2025 report |
Source: IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, Full Year 2025 (April 2026). Compound annual growth 2021–2025: 11.7% (Axis Intelligence Research calculation).
Quarterly U.S. Digital Ad Spend, 2025
Growth accelerated through the year rather than fading. The IAB/PwC data shows Q1 2025 up 12.2%, Q2 up 12.8%, Q3 up 14.9%, and Q4 up 15.4% — with Q4 alone adding $11.3 billion.
| Quarter | 2025 revenue (US$ bn) | 2024 revenue (US$ bn) | YoY growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 | 65.021 | 57.965 | 12.2% |
| Q2 | 70.015 | 62.085 | 12.8% |
| Q3 | 74.543 | 64.857 | 14.9% |
| Q4 | 85.014 | 73.665 | 15.4% |
Source: IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, Full Year 2025. Second-half share of annual revenue: 54.2% (Axis Intelligence Research calculation).
Elena Rodriguez: The back-weighting is structural — Q4 always carries the holiday load — but the acceleration is the tell. 2024 had an Olympics and a presidential election propping up the base. 2025 had neither and still cleared 13.9%. When a market laps a cyclical year and grows faster anyway, the demand is not coming from events. It’s coming from budgets that moved and did not move back.
Digital Advertising Revenue by Format
The IAB/PwC report splits U.S. internet advertising into five reported formats. Search is still the largest bucket; video is the one moving.
| Format | 2025 (US$ bn) | 2024 (US$ bn) | YoY growth | Share of 2025 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Search | 114.2 | 102.9 | 11.0% | 38.8% | IAB/PwC FY2025 |
| Display | 81.6 | 74.3 | 9.8% | 27.7% | IAB/PwC FY2025 |
| Digital video | 78.0 | 62.1 | 25.4% | 26.5% | IAB/PwC FY2025 |
| Digital audio | 8.4 | 7.6 | 10.2% | 2.8% | IAB/PwC FY2025 |
| Other | 12.5 | 11.7 | 6.9% | 4.2% | IAB/PwC FY2025 |
Source: IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, Full Year 2025. “Display” includes banner, rich media, sponsorship and native. “Other” includes classified, directories and lead generation. Format totals may not sum to the annual total due to rounding in the source.
The Axis Incremental Capture Reading for Format
Share of base is the number everyone quotes. Share of growth is the number that predicts next year’s share of base.
Axis Intelligence Research finds that digital video captured 43.9% of every new U.S. digital advertising dollar in 2025 while holding 26.5% of the base. The formula is disclosed and reproducible: video’s stated increase of $15.8 billion divided by the market’s total increase of $36.0 billion ($294.6bn − $258.6bn). Search, at 38.8% of the base, took 31.7% of the increment ($11.4bn ÷ $36.0bn). Display took 20.3%.
A format taking growth faster than its base share is gaining. A format taking it slower is, in share terms, receding — even while its dollars rise. Search grew 11.0% in 2025 against 15.9% the year before, and the IAB report attributes the stabilisation to platforms integrating and monetising AI-driven search experiences inside existing ad models.
Cross-Cutting Categories
Social, programmatic, commerce media and podcast are not formats in the IAB taxonomy — they are cross-cutting views that overlap the format table above and cannot be added to it.
| Category | 2025 revenue (US$ bn) | YoY growth | Share of U.S. total | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Programmatic (ex-search) | 162.4 | 20.5% | 55.1% | IAB/PwC FY2025 |
| Social media | 117.7 | 32.6% | 40.0% | IAB/PwC FY2025 |
| Commerce media | 63.4 | 18.0% | 21.5% | IAB/PwC FY2025 |
| Creator advertising | 37.0 | — | 12.6% | IAB, cited in FY2025 report |
| Podcast | 2.862 | 17.6% | 1.0% | IAB/PwC FY2025 |
Source: IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, Full Year 2025. Share-of-total percentages are Axis Intelligence Research calculations against the $294.593bn U.S. total. Categories overlap and are not additive.
Non-programmatic placements excluding search fell 13.9% in 2025 to $18.0 billion. Podcast revenue reached $2.862 billion — 27.1 times the $105.7 million the category booked in 2015 — and our podcast advertising statistics report breaks that channel down to the CPM level. Social’s $117.7 billion is covered in depth in our social media statistics hub.
Which Companies Control Digital Advertising Revenue?
This is where most digital advertising statistics pages stop at a pie chart sourced to a research firm’s model. Axis Intelligence Research builds the answer from filings instead.
The Axis Digital Advertising Panel
The panel contains every U.S.-listed company that discloses a discrete advertising revenue line for the quarter in an SEC filing. That inclusion rule is deliberately mechanical: it is what makes the index reproducible by anyone with EDGAR access and no subscription.
| Company | Disclosed line | Q2 2026 (US$ m) | Q2 2025 (US$ m) | YoY | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alphabet | Google advertising | 81,629 | 71,340 | +14.4% | 8-K Ex. 99.1, July 22, 2026 |
| Meta Platforms | Advertising | 59,363 | 46,563 | +27.5% | 8-K Ex. 99.1, July 29, 2026 |
| Amazon | Advertising services | 19,809 | 15,694 | +26.2% | 8-K Ex. 99.1, July 30, 2026 |
| Snap | Advertising revenue | 1,282.5 | 1,173.5 | +9.3% | Form 10-Q, Q2 2026 |
| Ad revenue | 762 | 465 | +63.9% | Q2 2026 press release | |
| Panel total | — | 162,845.5 | 135,235.5 | +20.4% | Axis Intelligence Research |
Sources as listed. Reddit’s Q2 2025 advertising revenue of $465m is an Axis Intelligence Research calculation (see Methodology). Panel total and growth rate are Axis Intelligence Research calculations.
Three companies are deliberately outside the panel, and the reasons matter more than the omissions:
- Microsoft discloses search and news advertising growth excluding traffic acquisition costs, not an absolute quarterly dollar figure, so it cannot enter a dollar-denominated index without an estimate. An index that estimates its own inputs is not an index.
- Pinterest reported revenue of $1,180 million for Q2 2026, up 18%, with global monthly active users at 640 million — but its income statement carries a single revenue line rather than a separate advertising line. Substantially-all-advertising is not the same disclosure as advertising.
- The Trade Desk and other demand-side platforms earn platform fees on media they do not own. Adding a fee-based revenue line to owned-inventory advertising revenue would double-count the underlying spend.
PACI™ — The Platform Advertising Concentration Index
PACI™ (Platform Advertising Concentration Index) measures the share of the Axis Digital Advertising Panel’s total disclosed quarterly advertising revenue held by the two largest sellers, Alphabet and Meta.
PACI = (Alphabet advertising revenue + Meta advertising revenue) ÷ total panel advertising revenue × 100
Applied to the quarter ended June 30, 2026: ($81,629m + $59,363m) ÷ $162,845.5m × 100 = 86.58, which Axis Intelligence Research publishes as 86.6.
| Reading | Date | PACI™ | Top-three share | Panel total (US$ m) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline, prior-year comparative | Quarter ended June 30, 2025 | 87.2 | 98.8 | 135,235.5 |
| Current | Quarter ended June 30, 2026 | 86.6 | 98.7 | 162,845.5 |
Source: Axis Intelligence Research, computed from the SEC filings listed in the panel table. These are the first two published readings and constitute the index baseline; no earlier history has been computed.
The headline concentration barely moved — 0.6 of a point. What moved is the composition underneath it. Alphabet’s share of the panel fell 2.63 percentage points to 50.1%, while Meta’s rose 2.02 points to 36.5% and Amazon’s rose 0.56 points to 12.2%. The duopoly is not loosening; one half of it is transferring share to the other half and to the third seller.
Incremental Capture Ratio
The companion reading published with every PACI update is the Incremental Capture Ratio — the share of the panel’s year-over-year revenue increase taken by the top sellers.
The panel added $27.61 billion of advertising revenue between Q2 2025 and Q2 2026. Axis Intelligence Research finds Alphabet and Meta captured 83.6% of that increment ($23.09bn), and the top three captured 98.5% ($27.20bn). Snap and Reddit together accounted for $406 million — 1.5%.
Reddit grew its ad line 63.9%, the fastest rate in the panel by a wide margin, and it moved the panel’s composition by 0.12 of a percentage point. That gap between growth rate and share movement is the whole story of challenger platforms in this market.
Elena Rodriguez: Run this the way a media buyer runs a budget rather than the way a journalist runs a headline. If you are allocating spend across the panel by revenue share, 98.7% of your addressable inventory sits with three sellers, and any negotiating leverage you think you have is a rounding error against a base that grew 20.4% without you. The interesting line is not the concentration figure. It’s Google Network at $7.303 billion, down about 1% — the only line in the panel going backwards, and the one that represents third-party publisher inventory. Money is not leaving digital advertising. It is leaving the open web and moving inside owned properties, and the filings say so line by line.
What Is Driving Digital Ad Growth in 2026?
Price, Not Just Volume
Meta delivered 14% more ad impressions year over year in Q2 2026 at a 12% higher average price per ad, with family daily active people at 3.60 billion for June 2026. Snap’s disclosure runs the other way: advertising revenue rose 9% on a roughly 10% increase in average cost per advertising impression, which means the growth came from pricing rather than inventory.
Advertisers who model CPM inflation as a market-wide constant will misprice both. The two companies moved in opposite directions on volume in the same quarter.
Commerce Media and Retail Networks
Commerce media reached $63.4 billion in the U.S. in 2025, up 18.0% — decelerating from 23.0% growth the year prior. Amazon’s advertising services line, the largest single disclosed commerce-media business, grew 26.2% to $19.809 billion in Q2 2026, well ahead of the 15% growth in its online stores line. Amazon also reported that advertisers using its Ads Agent tool see 8% lower cost-per-impression and 6% lower cost-per-acquisition than those who do not.
AI Interfaces as an Emerging Channel
WPP Media forecasts generative search advertising at $5.1 billion globally in 2026, projecting it will pass $100 billion by 2030 — which would make it the fastest-scaling media channel on record. Against a $1.3 trillion global market, $5.1 billion is four-tenths of one percent. The forecast is a growth-rate claim, not a scale claim, and should be cited as such.
The IAB report frames the same shift from the publisher side: AI summaries and chat-based discovery have reduced search referral traffic, pushing publishers toward licensing models, pay-per-use fees and content marketplaces to replace it.
Concentration Beyond the Panel
Two independent measurements point the same direction. The IAB/PwC report finds the top 10 companies held 84.1% of U.S. internet advertising revenue in 2025, up 3.3 points from 80.8% in 2024, with companies ranked 11–25 at 8.3% and all remaining sellers at 7.5%. WPP Media separately puts the top three sellers outside China — Alphabet, Meta and Amazon — at 57.6% of the global market, with no traditional media owner in the global top ten.
Those two figures are not interchangeable: one is U.S. survey-based and counts the top ten, the other is a global model and counts the top three. Axis Intelligence Research reports them side by side rather than reconciling them, because the methodologies do not align well enough to merge.
Digital Advertising vs Other Media
The IAB/PwC report places internet advertising’s 13.9% growth against other media, drawn from PwC’s Entertainment and Media Outlook.
| Medium | 2025 growth |
|---|---|
| Video games and esports | +22.0% |
| Internet advertising | +13.9% |
| B2B | +3.1% |
| Out-of-home | +2.2% |
| Music, radio and podcast | +1.3% |
| Newspaper and consumer magazine | −3.5% |
| TV advertising | −13.4% |
Source: Internet advertising from IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report FY2025; all other media from PwC’s Entertainment and Media Outlook, as published in that report.
TV’s 13.4% decline reverses 6.6% growth in 2024, and the report attributes part of that swing to 2025 being a non-cyclical year without the Olympics or a U.S. presidential election.
The Regulatory Overhang on Ad Tech
On April 17, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia held that Google violated antitrust law by monopolising open-web digital advertising markets — specifically the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets — in a case brought by the Department of Justice and a coalition of states. The remedies phase concluded with closing arguments in November 2025, with the government seeking divestiture of Google’s AdX exchange and Google proposing behavioural remedies instead.
Axis Intelligence Research’s searches as of August 14, 2026 did not surface a published final remedies order. We are not going to characterise an outcome that has not been filed. What can be said from the filings we did read: Google Network revenue, the line most exposed to any structural remedy, is the only advertising line in our panel currently in decline.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure in this report was retrieved from a primary document during production between August 13 and August 14, 2026. Market-level U.S. figures come from the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, Full Year 2025, published April 16, 2026. Company-level figures come from SEC filings — Forms 8-K with earnings exhibits, and Form 10-Q where a disaggregation appears only there. Global forecast figures come from WPP Media’s This Year Next Year 2026 Global Midyear Forecast, published June 16, 2026, and are labelled as forecasts throughout. No secondary aggregator is used as the source of any figure in this report.
PACI™ formula. PACI = (Alphabet advertising revenue + Meta advertising revenue) ÷ total Axis Digital Advertising Panel revenue × 100, for a stated calendar quarter. Panel membership rule: any U.S.-listed company disclosing a discrete advertising revenue line for the quarter in an SEC filing. Inputs are taken at filed values with no adjustment for currency, seasonality or accounting policy. Readings carry the quarter-end date. The panel is reviewed each quarter; any addition or removal is disclosed with the reading that first reflects it, and prior readings are not restated silently.
Incremental Capture Ratio. ICR = (top-n advertising revenue in period t − top-n advertising revenue in period t−4 quarters) ÷ (panel total in period t − panel total in period t−4 quarters) × 100.
Format increment shares. Video’s share of the U.S. increment uses the IAB report’s stated $15.8 billion increase for video over the report’s stated $36.0 billion market increase. Deriving the video increase by subtracting the rounded annual format figures ($78.0bn − $62.1bn) yields $15.9bn; we use the source’s stated figure, which reflects unrounded underlying data.
Derived value. Reddit’s Q2 2025 advertising revenue is not stated as an absolute in the company’s Q2 2026 release. It is calculated as total Q2 2025 revenue of $499.6 million less Q2 2025 other revenue, itself derived from the stated Q2 2026 other revenue of $43 million and its stated 24% growth. The result, $465 million, reconciles to the stated 64% advertising growth to within 0.1 percentage point. It is flagged axis_calculated = yes in the accompanying dataset.
Arithmetic. All calculations were computed in Python and re-run in a second independent pass before publication. Every number in this report exists as a row in the downloadable dataset with its source URL and retrieval date.
Scope. PACI covers disclosed public-company advertising revenue only. It excludes private and non-U.S.-listed sellers — TikTok and Chinese platforms most significantly — so it should be read as a concentration measure within U.S. public-market disclosure, not as global market share. Company advertising lines are worldwide, while IAB/PwC measures U.S.-based revenue only; the two are reported separately here and never combined into a single ratio. Panel figures are quarterly and unadjusted for seasonality, so quarter-to-quarter movement should be read year-over-year rather than sequentially.
About This Dataset
digital-advertising-statistics-2026.csv contains every figure cited in this report, one observation per row, with full provenance: value, unit, as-of date, source organisation, source document, source URL, retrieval date, primary-source flag, Axis-calculated flag and method note.
Licence: CC BY 4.0. Free to reuse, including commercially, with attribution.
Citation: Axis Intelligence Research, Digital Advertising Statistics 2026, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/digital-advertising-statistics/
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the IAB figure differ from the total revenue of Google, Meta and Amazon combined?
Because they measure different universes. IAB/PwC measures U.S.-based internet advertising revenue across the whole market, including thousands of publishers and networks. Company advertising lines in SEC filings are worldwide and include revenue earned outside the United States. Adding one to the other, or dividing one by the other, produces a ratio with no meaning.
What does “ex-TAC” mean and why does Microsoft report that way?
Ex-TAC means excluding traffic acquisition costs — the payments a seller makes to partners who send it traffic or supply inventory. Microsoft reports search and news advertising growth excluding TAC because the gross figure includes revenue it passes straight through to syndication partners. Alphabet discloses total TAC separately, at $16.179 billion for Q2 2026.
Is the open web losing advertising revenue?
Within the Axis panel, the one line built on third-party publisher inventory — Google Network — declined about 1% year over year to $7.303 billion in Q2 2026, while every owned-and-operated line grew. Separately, non-programmatic placements excluding search fell 13.9% across the U.S. market in 2025. Both point the same way, though neither measures the open web in full.
How much of digital advertising is bought programmatically?
Programmatic advertising revenue excluding search reached $162.4 billion in the U.S. in 2025, growing 20.5% — 55.1% of total U.S. internet advertising revenue by our calculation. The IAB defines programmatic as a buying method rather than a format, so it overlaps display, video and audio revenue rather than sitting alongside them.
Is commerce media still the fastest-growing channel?
No. Commerce media grew 18.0% in 2025, down from 23.0% the prior year. Digital video grew 25.4% and social media grew 32.6% over the same period. Commerce media remains one of the largest categories at $63.4 billion, but on growth rate it was overtaken in 2025.
Does generative search advertising matter yet at a media-planning level?
Not at a budget level in 2026. WPP Media forecasts $5.1 billion globally this year against a projected $1.3 trillion market. The channel is worth tracking for its growth trajectory — the same forecast has it crossing $100 billion by 2030 — but a planner allocating 2026 spend is allocating against a channel that is roughly four-tenths of one percent of the market.
Are CPMs rising or falling in 2026?
It depends on the seller, which is why a market-wide CPM figure is misleading. Meta reported average price per ad up 12% year over year in Q2 2026 alongside 14% impression growth. Snap reported average cost per advertising impression up roughly 10%, with the entire advertising increase attributable to that pricing move rather than to inventory expansion.
How is PACI™ different from a standard market-share figure?
A market-share figure needs a denominator someone has to estimate — total market size. PACI’s denominator is the sum of five disclosed, audited-basis line items from SEC filings, so any analyst can rebuild the reading from the same filings and get the same number. That reproducibility is the trade-off: PACI is narrower than a market-share estimate, and exact rather than approximate.
When does the next PACI reading publish?
After every panel member has filed for the quarter. For Q3 2026 that points to the first half of November 2026. Each reading carries its quarter-end date and enters the Axis canonical figure registry, so no other Axis page quotes a divergent value.