Dive Brief:
- Digital advertising revenue grew 13.9% year over year to a record $294.6 billion in 2025 despite economic headwinds and a lack of cyclical events such as the Olympics, according to the latest annual report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PwC.
- Video, creator content and performance media were three pillars of growth while artificial intelligence reshaped discovery, creative production and monetization. Creator advertising grew at a faster clip than the overall ad market last year while search saw its rate of growth cool.
- The research, now in its 30th year, noted that many of the same trends that are driving momentum for digital advertising are leading to further consolidation among leading global platforms as marketers require scale, richer first-party data and integrated commerce capabilities for success.
Dive Insight:
The IAB’s latest assessment of the internet ad economy finds social and creator-led marketing continuing a steady ascent and becoming more institutionalized within marketing organizations following a period that saw many large advertisers shift more budgets toward those areas.
Social media advertising was up 32.6% YoY to $117.7 billion in 2025, representing a rate of growth roughly in line with the year prior. The channel, which now commands the largest share of the total digital market at 40%, is tipping the balance of power among the leading platforms.
Instagram owner Meta is expected to surpass Google — the longstanding top player in digital — in terms of both U.S. and global ad revenue for the first time in 2026, according to a recent Emarketer forecast. Search, the bedrock channel of Google’s ads business, is on the wane, with its rate of growth declining nearly five percentage points compared to 2024. Search’s overall share of the pie is still sizable at $114.2 billion in annual revenue, but the AI takeover is rapidly altering both user habits and monetization strategy.
Creator content, meanwhile, has become enshrined as a “core media channel” for advertisers versus an add-on, the IAB said. The creator economy generated $37 billion in spending last year and is on track to hit $44 billion in 2026 as brands shift from one-off campaign partnerships to an always-on approach that weds micro, affiliate and performance-focused creators.
“Brands are embedding creators into the foundations of their media strategies, operational workflows and even product development,” the IAB said in the report, later noting that ad agencies are also developing more well-rounded creator capabilities.
Creators are seeing a bump in value for a few reasons beyond follower counts. More creators are tapping into commerce media to drive transactions, tying brand and awareness building more closely to performance. Commerce media on the whole rose 18% last year to $63.4 billion, though its rate of growth was down five percentage points from 2024.
Additionally, more consumers are attracted to the human qualities of creators as feeds are flooded with low-quality, AI-generated content, also known as “slop.” AI is causing other problems for marketers, with over 50% of global web traffic now estimated to stem from bot activity, according to the IAB. The trade group used the AI transparency crisis as a call for more industry measurement and interoperability standards, including through its recently unveiled Project Eidos initiative.
Other noteworthy trends identified by the IAB include video — a category that includes connected TV, social video and online video — increasing revenue 25.4% YoY to $78 billion in 2025, an acceleration in growth over the year prior. Video game and esports revenue also saw a massive bump in growth, at 22%, over 2024 due to more robust in-game advertising formats, higher demand and greater measurement sophistication.
Even as some of the sector’s underlying dynamics shift in significant ways, digital advertising does not appear primed for a major shakeup. After brands diversified some of their media spending to midsize firms in 2024, power again is consolidating among established heavyweights. The top 10 global media platforms increased their share of digital ad revenue by 3.4% in 2025, commanding 84.1% of the total market, while spending allotted to smaller and mid-sized platforms shrunk.
