Global ad revenue is growing and the top earners are taking an increasingly bigger cut.
Google and Facebook are driving nearly all growth in the global ad market
This is the year digital beats TV.
Rani Molla was a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.
Google is the largest recipient of global ad revenue, taking in $79 billion in 2016, according to new data from media agency Zenith. That’s three times as much as the No. 2 biggest ad revenue recipient, Facebook, which raked in nearly $27 billion in ad revenue last year.
Growth in ad revenue is coming mainly from digital ads. And in general, ad spending is consolidating. The top 30 recipients of ad revenue in 2016 accounted for 44 percent of all ad revenue spend, according to Zenith. That’s up from 39 percent in 2015 and 33 percent back in 2012.
Internet advertising is expected to overtake television this year, and companies like Google and Facebook that are heavily invested in the digital ad market will continue to be rewarded. Baidu, Microsoft, Yahoo, Verizon and Twitter, which also rely on advertising from digital media, can expect to gain from internet advertising growth.
Facebook began out-earning Comcast in ad revenue in 2015. Comcast, which ranks third, has increased its digital ad revenue in recent years, thanks in part to its investments in new media, including this site. (Comcast owns NBCUniversal, which is an investor in Vox Media, which owns this site.)
Here’s a list of the top 30 global ad revenue recipients, across media, in 2016:
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
