IAB and PwC: digital ad revenue grew 13.9% YoY to $294.6B in 2025; social media ads grew 32.6% YoY to $117.7B and digital video ads grew 25.4% YoY to $78B
The 13.9% pop was driven by social media, up 32.6% to $117.7 billion and digital video, up 25.4% to $74 billion last year
Context & Ripple Effects
The IAB/PwC series shows a long-running expansion of U.S. digital advertising: revenue moved from $59.6B in 2015 to $225B in 2023, while growth rotated from mobile-led gains toward video and, most recently, social media. The 2022 report had already shown social growth cooling sharply; the 2025 figures mark a pronounced reacceleration in the formats driving the market.
First-order effects
- Social-media and digital-video advertising become the immediate sources of incremental digital-ad revenue, with social revenue reported at $117.7B after 32.6% growth and video up 25.4%.
- IAB and PwC’s reported 13.9% increase to $294.6B indicates that the overall digital market expanded faster than its 2023 growth rate, despite the report’s inconsistent video-revenue figure ($74B in the description and $78B in the relationships).
Second-order effects
- Publishers, platforms, and ad-tech providers with social and video inventory gain more leverage in budget allocation, while formats outside those growth engines must compete harder for share of digital spend.
- The rebound in social advertising growth reverses the deceleration highlighted in the 2022 coverage, increasing pressure on advertisers to maintain measurement and creative capacity across both social feeds and video placements.
Third-order effects
- If social and video continue to outgrow total digital advertising, the market’s growth will become more concentrated in distribution environments that combine audience reach with rich media inventory.
- The historical sequence—from mobile-led growth to digital overtaking television and now faster social/video expansion—points to a continuing reallocation of advertising economics toward digitally distributed formats, though the corpus does not establish which platforms capture that value.
The trend: Digital advertising is increasingly being propelled by social and video formats rather than broad-based growth across all online inventory.