Mobile Growth Pushes Facebook to Become No. 2 US Digital Ad Seller
Mobile now accounts for more than 22% of all US digital ad spending, compared with less than 3% in 2010 — US mobile ad spending is expected to near $9.6 billion in 2013 and account for a whopping 22.5% of all digital ad investments …
Context & Ripple Effects
Five months after eMarketer charted Facebook's big gains in global mobile ad market share, the firm converts that trajectory into a domestic ranking: with mobile approaching $9.6 billion of US spend in 2013 — 22.5% of all digital ad investment, up from under 3% in 2010 — Facebook now sells more US digital advertising than everyone except one company.
The story travelled unusually far the day it published, picked up by Forbes, AdAge, CNET, Marketing Land, VentureBeat, Business Insider, Internet2Go and VatorNews. It also landed alongside a separate confirmed development: Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg filed a 70 million-share secondary sale that knocked the stock down on Nasdaq — insiders monetizing precisely the mobile-ad momentum the ranking celebrates.
First-order effects
- Facebook enters agency planning for 2014 as the No. 2 US digital ad seller, giving its sales operation a top-two slot in every major advertiser's media plan.
- Budgets following the 22.5% mobile share move onto phones, where Facebook's feed-based inventory is positioned to capture the shift directly.
Second-order effects
- Web-centric publishers and ad networks end up competing for the shrinking non-mobile remainder of digital budgets, since each point that shifts to mobile flows toward mobile-native sellers.
- The developer side compounds the squeeze: Facebook is already the most popular social service mobile developers connect to via its API, so distribution and ad dollars tilt toward the same platform simultaneously.
Third-order effects
- A format that went from under 3% to over a fifth of US digital spend in three years points toward an ad market structured around whoever owns mobile-native audiences — forcing agencies and measurement practices to rebuild around app-based formats rather than the open web.
- If the pattern holds, US digital ad rankings become a function of app engagement rather than page views, entrenching a small set of mobile platforms at the top of the sell side.
The trend: US digital advertising is reorganizing around the smartphone, with mobile-native platforms converting audience engagement directly into ad-market rank.