eMarketer predicts that US digital ad spending will surpass traditional in 2019, growing 19% YoY to $129.34B, of which mobile will account for ~$87B
Amazon's ad business to grow more than 50%, taking bite out of duopoly — This year will mark a major milestone in the world of advertising.
Context & Ripple Effects
This forecast is the culmination of a decade-long migration the corpus has tracked step by step: eMarketer called display ads overtaking search back in 2016, and by late 2018 it had Amazon climbing past Microsoft into third place in US digital ad share. The 2019 crossover point — digital passing traditional outright — is what turns those incremental shifts into a regime change.
The second story inside this one is the duopoly's first real crack. The same year's follow-up data showed Google's share slipping below 38% while Amazon's rose to 8.8%, and by 2020 Amazon had reached 10.3% of the market on 52.5% revenue growth — validating this article's 'more than 50%' projection almost exactly.
First-order effects
- Google and Facebook face their first sustained share erosion at the hands of a third player, as Amazon's projected 50%-plus growth comes directly out of the duopoly's grip on US digital budgets.
- Traditional media sellers lose their majority position in US ad spend for the first time, with mobile alone (~$87B) now dwarfing most legacy channels.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers chasing purchase-intent audiences shift incremental budget toward Amazon's commerce-adjacent inventory, forcing Google and Facebook to defend pricing and product roadmaps against a rival that owns the transaction data they lack.
- Mobile-first platforms absorb nearly all net-new ad dollars, squeezing publishers whose inventory is desktop- and display-weighted into a shrinking pool.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the US ad market structurally consolidates around a handful of platforms rather than a two-player duopoly — a trajectory the IAB later confirmed when its top 10 players captured 78.6% of a record $189B digital market in 2021.
- Retail-media advertising emerges as a permanent third pillar alongside search and social, because Amazon's growth is anchored in data no other competitor can replicate: what shoppers actually buy.
The trend: US advertising is completing its shift from traditional media to a digitally concentrated market where commerce platforms, not just search and social engines, set the terms for ad budgets.