Report: US digital ad spend to rise 16% in 2017 to $83B, as ad revenue of Snapchat to rise 158%, Facebook by 32%, Google by 15%, and Twitter to drop by 4.7%
Snapchat poised for “explosive growth” but will remain a small piece of the entire digital ad pie, according to eMarketer's forecast
Context & Ripple Effects
This eMarketer forecast lands three months after WPP chief Martin Sorrell committed $70M of agency spend to Snapchat for 2017 against $5.5B on Google and $1.75B on Facebook — a bet that advertisers were hunting for scale beyond the duopoly. The new numbers validate the hunt but cap its payoff: Snapchat's 158% growth comes off so small a base that it barely dents Facebook's 32% and Google's 15% gains within a $83B market.
The forecast also marks the start of an arc the later coverage completes: US digital ad spend crossing traditional media in eMarketer's 2019 projection of $129.34B, then decelerating hard into the 10.8% growth and 3.6% social-media growth recorded for 2022. The 16% headline here is the boom-phase baseline those later numbers are measured against.
First-order effects
- Facebook and Google absorb the bulk of the $83B pool — a combined ~$14B incremental gain versus Snapchat's fast-but-small 158% climb — leaving Twitter as the only named platform shrinking, down 4.7%.
- Twitter's decline forces it to compete for the same brand budgets WPP is reallocating, directly against a Snapchat that Sorrell's agency had just begun funding.
Second-order effects
- Agencies' diversification experiments get priced by results: if Snapchat's explosive percentage growth fails to translate into meaningful share, holding-company dollars flow back to the duopoly rather than to second-tier platforms.
- Twitter's negative growth makes it a candidate for strategic repositioning — product pivots or cost cuts — since its ad business is losing ground in an expanding market, not a contracting one.
Third-order effects
- The pattern established here — duopoly compounding while challengers grow off tiny bases — hardens into market structure, visible by 2022 when social ad growth slows to 3.6% and the gap between leaders and everyone else has become the industry's defining feature.
- A market growing 16% annually draws regulatory and advertiser scrutiny of concentration: once digital passes traditional spend, the question shifts from whether brands shift budgets online to who controls the auction they shift into.
The trend: US digital advertising is consolidating into a Google-Facebook duopoly whose combined gains outpace every challenger's percentage growth, with the market's overall expansion masking a widening gap at the bottom.