Where the growth actually was in 2025
US digital advertising reached $294.6 billion, up 13.9%, in a year with no Olympics, no World Cup and no election. Underneath the total, the mix moved sharply.
iStudios, Media practice
The IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report for full-year 2025, published in April 2026, records $294.6bn of US digital ad revenue, a 13.9% increase. What makes that figure unusual is the absence of the cyclical events that normally inflate a strong year. No Olympic Games, no men's World Cup, no US federal election. This was underlying demand.
The mix, not the total
Social took $117.7bn and grew 32.6%, the fastest of any major format. Search took $114.2bn but grew 11%, down from 15.9% the year before. That is the first time in a long while that search has been comfortably outgrown by another large format. Digital video reached $78bn, up 25.4%. Commerce media contributed $63.4bn, up 18%. Display managed $81.6bn on 9.8%. Podcast, small but stubbornly healthy, took $2.9bn on 17.6%.
Two of those numbers deserve to be read together. Search decelerating while social and video accelerate is not a rounding error; it is the beginning of a shift in where discovery happens, and it arrives at the same moment that AI-generated answers are changing what a search result page even is.
Search grew 11% in a market that grew 13.9%. For the largest line item in digital advertising, losing share is the news.
Creator spend became a line item
The same report puts creator advertising at $37bn in 2025, with $44bn projected for 2026. That is no longer an experimental budget administered by whoever is youngest in the room. At that scale it needs the same treatment as any other channel: briefs, rate cards, usage rights, brand-safety standards and, the part that is usually missing, measurement that is not screenshots of engagement.
What we would change in a 2026 plan
- Rebalance towards video and social with intent, not drift. If the fastest-growing formats are absorbing the market's growth, a flat allocation is a decision to shrink.
- Stop treating search as the safe default. Defend the branded terms, interrogate everything else, and assume the SERP you are buying against will look different in eighteen months.
- Give creator spend a proper operating model before it gets bigger, because retrofitting governance onto a channel is always more expensive than building it.
- Hold commerce media to the same incrementality bar as everything else.