Digital ad market consolidation shows little sign of stopping. Rather than disrupting the duopoly, Amazon’s ad business looks to have joined it as a third giant, growing its share primarily from the long tail. By the end of next year, nearly 70% of US digital ad dollars will end up with one of the three leading ad sellers.
And that’s just on a net basis—when advertisers consider how they allocate their budgets, they’ll likely see even greater shares going to the top three. Google’s YouTube, for example, pays out a portion of its gross ad revenues to creators, and all three companies also have programmatic ad businesses where they keep a percentage of the spending that passes through their stacks.