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A rising tide might lift all boats, but the resurgence in the ad market is flowing mostly to the giants.
The companies that measure their market cap in the trillions are the ones reaping the rewards of the advertising rebound of 2024, leaving much of the legacy media and even tech's smaller players out of the comeback story.
This year Google and Meta, the top two in the digital ads market, are expected to haul in more than $140 billion, according to forecasts by Insider Intelligence. The duo is on track to once again claim nearly half of all digital ads revenue. Even as brands spend their way out of a multiyear ad slump, it's mega enterprises who will be feasting while mostly everyone else claws for scraps.
Investors pummeled Snap this week for posting merely 5% revenue growth, the latest example of Wall Street punishing anything that doesn't look like Zuckerbergian conquest. Meta set the bar for expansion. The social media king catapulted its advertising revenue 24% higher, more than doubling the pace of rival Google's 11%. Wall Street dinged Google for that too.
Where ad dollars flow underscores the selectiveness of the recovery. Amazon last week reported its ads business swelled 27% year over year. While the company sits in third place in the digital ads market, Amazon is poised to gobble even greater share. It's in the early stages of converting an untapped Prime Video streaming service into an ad platform with a massive, built-in audience. Watch it on Amazon then buy it on Amazon.
Overall, worldwide digital ad spending is projected to increase 13.2% this year, the data shows, compared to traditional media ad growth of 2.4%.
The other major players expected to amplify their ads business are following a similar playbook of platform economics, capturing the eyeballs of enormous online ecosystems: Walmart and TikTok.
As if it couldn't get any harder to run with Big Tech, the same companies that upended the ads business through search and social media are deploying their huge cash piles to invest in new AI tools. They stand to rejigger markets and the attention economy further in their favor.
Even Disney (DIS), fresh off a significant earnings beat, a dividend boost, and a burst of flashy announcements, still struggles with the baggage of a legacy media business. Its linear networks segment fell 12% compared to the same period last year, the company reported Wednesday, while the unit's operating income fell 7%.
Fox's (FOX) ad revenue, which makes up nearly half of the company's total sales, tumbled 20% in the December quarter versus the year prior, it disclosed earlier this week.
And while other media names are scheduled to report later this month, including Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and Paramount (PARA), it's likely their ad-reliant finances, without Bob Iger's streaming head start and dealmaking pizzazz, will reveal more of the same.
Hamza Shaban is a reporter for Yahoo Finance covering markets and the economy. Follow Hamza on Twitter @hshaban.
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