eMarketer has revealed some fascinating news.
According to its latest forecast, net US digital ad revenues will decline in absolute terms.
In other words, Google is taking home fewer dollars than the year before.
This has never happened since eMarketer started forecasting such a metric.
In its estimate, eMarketer puts the figure at $39.58 billion for 2020.
This is 5.3% down on the previous year.
This in the context of a slightly increasing triopoly.
The combined U.S. ad revenues of Google, Amazon and Facebook combined is estimated to grow by $1.69 billion, approximately 2%.
This means that Google is losing market share while Facebook and Amazon are growing both in absolute and in % terms.
Nicole Perrin, eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said “Google has been growing its net US ad revenues at a slower rate than the overall digital ad market since 2016, so this year will continue a trend of Google losing digital ad market share in the US.”
The challenges to the digital advertising market are linked to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economy crisis.
eMarketer has revised sharply downwards its pre-COVID-19 forecasts.
Google has been particularly impacted as it derives a considerable amount of revenue from the travel industry.
