Dive Brief:

• The latest figures from Pew’s State of the News Media report found that $59.6 billion was spent on digital advertising last year, a 20% year-over-year increase. That growth rate is an increase over the previous three years where growth ranged between 15% and 17%.
• Mobile accounted for more than half of all digital advertising in 2015, totaling $31.6 billion and a 65% increase over 2014.
• Display advertising was up 27% last year, reaching $26.8 billion, based largely on an increase in mobile display.

Dive Insight:

The Pew report, which comes out every year, gives the media industry a wide-ranging look at the trends shaping the future of the business. There are many salient stats in the report for marketers about how consumers use the media, from the accelerating growth of digital to the even-faster growth of mobile. 

The Pew report found that video ads are growing faster than banner ads, although banner ads still command more ad dollars. Banner ads were up 13%, accounting for 44% of total display ad spending, but video ads increased 46%, and now account for 29% of total display spending. 

But as consumers adopt ad blocking software in droves, banner ads are losing steam while native ads and content marketing efforts are becoming increasingly important for marketers to reach consumers in ways they find seamless, unintrusive and even valuable. Facebook conducted internal research around these ad formats and found that only native and video ads provided real value for its advertisers. Even though banner ads lead the display category, Facebook effectively dropped the format from its ad platform.

Pew also found that five companies (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Verizon) accounted for more than half of all display advertising revenue. Mobile display had a similar situation with four of the same five companies dominating ad revenue (and Pandora taking Verizon’s place).

“Facebook and Twitter in particular rely heavily on mobile for their digital ad revenue: 88% of Twitter’s digital ad revenue came from mobile in 2015, as did 77% of Facebook’s," Pew's Kristine Lu and Jesse Holcomb wrote about the report. "Mobile ads account for smaller shares of digital ad revenue for Google and Yahoo (41% and 35% respectively), but mobile’s share is growing in both cases (these data are not reported for Microsoft).”