Facebook’s Australian advertising revenue has been forecasted to more than double from $700m to $1.6bn in 2024.
That’s according to investment bank Morgan Stanley, which released a research note looking at the consolidation of tech companies Google and Facebook in Australia.
For Facebook, COVID-19 will not stop the social media giant from increasing ad revenue by around seven per cent this year alone.
This growth will accelerate in 2021 and beyond.
“We forecast a lower, but still positive 7 per cent growth rate in 2020, consistent with the wider ad industry slowdown, before rising at a compound annual growth rate of 16 per cent over the four years to the $1.2bn to 1.6bn range in revenues in 2024,” the firm said, in the filing published by The Australian.
It comes as US tech giants continue to grow their local presence.
“Digital/internet and mobile advertising in Australia is dominated by US-based tech companies such as Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube, Snap, Twitter, et al. Based on ASIC filings and our discussions with industry contacts, our estimate is that global tech players collected an aggregate of $6.2bn worth of ad spend in Australia in 2019,” Morgan Stanley wrote.
The Australian revenue of Google and Facebook is of particular interest at the moment, as the ACCC works to develop a bargaining code between tech giants and local media businesses.
The deal will see Google and Facebook ‘pay for news‘ for the first time.
Some have suggested the amount these companies pay be determined based on local revenue.
Nine chairman Peter Costello has said the companies should pay around $600 million – roughly 10 per cent of local revenue – a year into a fund to be distributed between local media companies.
