eMarketer: US advertisers are on track to spend $65.3B on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks in 2022, up 3.6% YoY, which is ~10x slower than in 2021
A decade-long era of breakneck growth in social media advertising has come to an abrupt halt. Who killed the boom? Tweets: @alexeheath and @philwahba See also Mediagazer Tweets: Alex Heath / @alexeheath : I mean, Apple? https://twitter.com/... Phil Wahba / @philwahba : The social media companies themselves? By serving up non-stop irrelevant ads to people after promising brands well targeted ads. The ads on my social feeds are absolutely perplexing and no more targeted than billboard ads, it feels like most of the time. https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
The eMarketer figure lands at the end of an arc the related coverage has been tracing for two years: Facebook's CPMs collapsed to record lows during the early-pandemic pullback, then Apple's ATT changes forced Meta's ad prices up and pushed some advertisers toward Google, Amazon, and TikTok. Small businesses that depend on personalized ads have been cutting marketing spend as customer acquisition costs climb.
The slowdown is not a forecast anomaly — IAC and PwC later confirmed social media ad revenue grew just 3.6% in 2022 versus roughly 39% in 2021, even as total US digital ad revenue still rose 10.8%. The debate over blame, joined publicly by Alex Heath (pointing at Apple) and Phil Wahba (pointing at the platforms' own ad relevance), frames what was once framed as a cyclical dip as something more structural.
First-order effects
- Meta and Twitter face a near-flat US social ad market after years of hypergrowth — FactSet's Q1 survey already had Meta growing 8% against Google's expected 23%, so the full-year 3.6% print confirms the gap widened.
- Advertisers who budgeted around double-digit social growth must re-plan: the money they committed to Facebook and Twitter either gets cut or redirected within their existing digital allocations.
Second-order effects
- Google, Amazon, and TikTok become the default beneficiaries — the WSJ reporting on Meta's ATT-driven price increases showed advertisers already shifting budgets there, and a 10x growth deceleration accelerates that reallocation.
- Small and mid-sized advertisers, squeezed by rising customer acquisition costs under ATT, respond by trimming marketing altogether rather than paying more for less-targeted reach, shrinking the demand base further.
Third-order effects
- If relevance keeps degrading while privacy changes persist, the market splits into platforms with first-party purchase data (search, retail media) and social networks competing on cheap reach — the NYT's reporting on a junk-ad epidemic suggests the latter path erodes the premium pricing personalization once commanded.
- Regulatory and platform-privacy pressure (ATT being the template) effectively restructures social advertising from a targeting business back toward a brand-reach business, with measurement firms and attribution vendors absorbing the disruption.
The trend: Social media advertising is decelerating from hypergrowth to single digits as Apple's privacy changes and weakening ad relevance push budgets toward search, commerce, and short-video rivals.