Spending on digital advertising continued to grow in 2014, with mobile ad spending showing the sharpest gains, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis.
Advertisers spent $50.7 billion on digital ads in 2014, up 18% from 2013, which was about the same as the previous year. Of all media advertising, digital made up 28%, a slight uptick from 25% in 2013.
Social media and technology companies continue to reap the rewards of digital ad spending, with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL generating 61% of all U.S. digital ad revenue in 2014, about $30.9 billion.
Google accounted for more than a third of it, but Facebook had stronger year-over-year growth, mostly because of its display advertising.
Based on data provided by the analytics firm comScore, Pew found that mobile advertising achieved the biggest gains.
Mobile ad revenue jumped 78% to $19 billion in 2014, a huge increase but still not as large as the past two years when revenues shot up 170%.
Still, mobile is making its mark. Mobile now accounts for 37% of all digital spending, up from 25% last year.
Advertisers are increasingly shifting toward display ads, such as banners or videos on news sites. Display ad revenue, including mobile display, grew 27% in 2014, a 5% increase over the prior year.
Banner ads, specifically, continued to bring in the greatest share of display ad revenue – about half – although that number has slipped as interest in video ads has increased.
Video ad spending grew 56% in 2014, making it the fastest-growing category of display advertising. What used to make up 14% of all digital display ad spending now makes up 27%.
The top news websites – Yahoo-ABC News, CNN Network, NBC News Digital and Huffington Post – are finding mobile is surpassing desktop use.
The Pew research found only seven of the top 50 news sites had more visits through desktop computers than mobile devices.
However, when it comes to the amount of time a visitor spends on a news site, desktop computers still dominate.
Only 10 of the 50 top news sites see their users engaged longer on mobile devices than desktop, including the websites of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, along with Gawker.com and Salon.com.
So, while mobile is increasingly important to news organizations, desktop is still valuable, especially among advertisers trying to get consumers to click on their ads.
