Digital Billboards

The explosion of screen time was fueled by a business model that at one point didn’t seem viable and was largely misunderstood: advertising. The notion of subsidizing an algorithmic search engine that crawls through 37 trillion gigabytes of data and delivers personalized results ranked by relevance within 0.2 seconds on tiny virtual billboards was a dubious business plan when Google first launched. What we neglected to consider, however, was the power of scale.

More users combined with more time spent on devices turned the digital advertising industry into a cash behemoth. In 2011, digital ads accounted for a fifth of all advertising revenue in the U.S. Since then, nondigital shrunk and digital exploded. Digital ads now drive 63% of all ad revenue in America, and they’ve turned advertising into a nearly $250 billion industry.

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U.S. Advertising Revenue

Sources: eMarketer, Pew Research Center.