A new study has revealed just how much the tech giants Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and Snapchat now snare in ad revenues alone.
The study, titled State Of Digital Media Report, was based on each company’s recent earnings reports and deduced that there’s not one “digital ad market” anymore but rather two media ecosystems – leaders and laggards.
“Google, Facebook, Amazon, Verizon, Microsoft, Twitter and Snap combined have 80 per cent of the market and their market is growing 20 per cent. The laggards have the rest of the market, which will shrink 11 per cent,” the report revealed.
Here are the top highlights from the top five players.
• $US32.6 billion in advertising revenue in Q4 2018 and a $US130 billion annual run-rate now, growing 20 per cent year over year. This means one in five total advertising dollars globally goes to Google.
• Continued focus on its O&O (owned and operated) business (Search, YouTube, Mail, Maps, Assistant, etc.), citing an increase in margin thanks to “favourablele revenue mix shift from Network to Sites”. O&O makes up 83 per cent of Google’s ad revenue.
* O&O site revenue grew 23 per cent year over year where network revenue grew only 12 per cent. Their margins continue to increase. Volume of ads (measured as paid clicks) on Google properties grew 66 per cent wherthe e volume on the network sites (measured as ad impressions) grew only seven per cent.
• With their revenue run-rate at $US68 billion, approximately one in 10 total ad dollars goes to Facebook. It saw a 30 per cent growth rate, which is double that of the digital ad market.
• Seven million advertisers and 90 million small businesses use their services (most of them for free). 50% plan to increase spend on Facebook and 73 per cent plan to increase spend on Instagram.
• 2.7 billion people use Facebook’s services and two billion people use them daily. Users are growing nine per cent year-over-year. They have 317 million fake or duplicate accounts.
• 83 times is how often the term “Stories” was referenced on their earnings call. “Privacy”, “Safety” and “Security” combined was mentioned 47 times.
Amazon
• $3.4 billion in advertising revenue in Q4 2018 and a $US13.5 billion annual run rate, growing 100 per cent year over year (the total digital market is growing 15 per cent).
• Not much else to report as Amazon is not talking about their ad business. The term advertising does not appear once in their investor presentation and a mere 19 times in their SEC 10-K filing (most of which refers to their own marketing programs versus advertising as a revenue source).
• $909 million in revenue last quarter, a 24 per cent year-over-year increase. Video is half of their advertising and the driving force behind revenue growth.
• Doubling down on O&O monetization, they introduced a new metric: monetizable Daily Active Users (mDAU) to get away from chasing scale that is meaningless to advertisers. Their non O&O revenue was down 18 per cent.
* The US market is 21 per cent of their user base but 57 per cent of their revenue, they have a big revenue growth opportunity internationally.
Snapchat
• $US390 million in revenue in Q4 2018 and a 43 per cent growth rate (three times that of the digital market). Annual revenue hitting $US1.2 billion with a high 68 per cent cost of revenue though.
• The promise of cheap ads: “We continue to deliver incredibly competitive CPMs and low cost per outcomes, resulting in highly performant campaigns.”
• With glowing public references to ESPN and NBC, they are clearly trying to cosy up with premium content as a way to balance the “other content” on the platform. Some 30 per cent more people are watching Publisher Stories and Shows daily compared to last year.
