Facebook races ahead in ad revenue even though share is falling

John Wren and Phippe Krakowsky may like to refer to their shiny new Omnicom/IPG as a “platform” as they prepare to measure up to the social media giants with their pooled data resources. But there’s been a timely reminder of what they’re up against.

Industry data source WARC has produced its latest look at Facebook and its findings include:

1/Facebook’s global advertising revenue is set to surpass $100bn in 2024 fuelled by innovation in AI and commerce to attract Gen Z
2/Retailers will invest $20bn on Facebook in 2024
3/Facebook has a global advertising audience of 2.2 billion. More than three-quarters of US adults use Facebook
4/Asian advertisers are targeting Western consumers on the platform
5/ Maybe most interestingly, all this despite Facebook’s share of the global social market dwindling: 88.9% in 2013 to 38.2% by 2025. What you might call managing decline with a vengeance. Instagram (also owned by Facebook owner Meta) and TikTok are the biggest gainers.

It’s easy to see from this how overwhelmingly dominant digital is in the global media market – set to hit $1 trillion next year – although, in reality, “media” now is a catch-all description for much that isn’t really advertising in the fullest sense. That other digital behemoth Google gets about half its take from search, which is paid-for commercial media but hardly full-on advertising.

As for Omnicom/IPG’s hopes of at slowing this relentless progress (if progress it is) when so much expenditure is eagerly consigned to the “walled gardens’ of Facebook, Google, Amazon and company (increasingly populated by AI tools) these hopes look rather forlorn. Social media’s data is surely bound to win out in the end because they have the (closely-guarded) rule books.

Advertisers, who ultimately decide these things, used to worry that half their spend on traditional ads was wasted. The likelihood is with digital it’s a lot more than half. But most of them, it seems, have stopped worrying.