September 22, 2026 · Arjun
Where the money actually went in 2025
Digital advertising in the United States reached $294.6 billion in 2025, up
13.9% on the year. That is a strong number in an economy nobody has described as
booming, and the interesting part is not the total. It is the distribution.
Social and video did the work
Social advertising reached $117.7 billion, growing 32.6%. Digital video
reached $78.0 billion, growing 25.4%. Against those, search at
$114.2 billion grew 11.0% and display at $81.6 billion grew
9.8%.
Put plainly: the formats that grew fastest are the ones where a person chose to be there.
Someone watching a video or scrolling a feed has opted into a context. Someone loading a page
with a display unit on it has generally opted into something else and got the advertising as a
side effect.
Programmatic kept compounding
Programmatic transacted $162.4 billion, growing 20.5% — faster than
the market as a whole. Automated buying is no longer a channel within digital advertising. It is
approximately how digital advertising works.
That matters because it means the quality of the pipes is now the quality of the industry. If
the automated layer is wasteful, the waste is not a rounding error at the edge of the market. It
is the market.
The creator line is the one to watch
Advertising running through creators reached $37 billion in 2025, and is projected at
$44 billion in 2026. It is growing from a small base, which makes the percentage
flattering, but the direction is unambiguous and it is structural rather than faddish.
The reason is simple. Attention has moved to people rather than properties. A brand that wants
to reach a particular audience increasingly finds that audience gathered around an individual,
not a publication. The infrastructure for buying that has not caught up with the demand for it,
which is a reasonable description of where we think the opportunity is.
What we take from it
Three things. Chosen contexts outperform interrupted ones, and the growth rates say so.
Automated buying is the substrate, so its integrity is everybody’s problem. And the creator layer
is where the infrastructure is thinnest relative to the money flowing through it.