Two Platforms, Half the Market

The Share That Kept Growing

When Pew Research Center began tracking the Google–Facebook share of United States digital advertising revenue in its State of the News Media reports, the combined figure for 2012 stood at roughly 35 percent. That number was already striking: two companies, one a search engine and one a social network, were absorbing more than a third of every dollar spent on digital advertising in the country. Every publisher selling banner ads, pre-roll video and sponsored content was competing for what remained.

The trajectory from that baseline was consistent and steep. Pew's 2014 State of the News Media report placed the combined share at approximately 41 percent, a figure that reflected Google's dominance in search advertising and Facebook's accelerating growth in display. By 2015 the share had reached roughly 49 percent, and the language inside the annual report shifted accordingly — from observation to concern. Publishers that had spent the early 2010s moving aggressively into digital formats were discovering that the inventory they had built was generating revenue at a fraction of what print had once produced, and that a growing portion of the premium advertising market had migrated to platforms they did not control.

The 2016 Pew report put the combined share above 50 percent for the first time — a threshold that trade press and media economists had been anticipating for several cycles. The significance was partly symbolic: a duopoly crossing a majority share of an entire advertising category is a structural fact, not a trend line. By 2017 the share had climbed further still, to approximately 56 percent according to Pew's reporting, with Google retaining the larger portion — roughly two-thirds of the pair's combined take — through its dominance in search, display, and, by that point, YouTube's video advertising business.

The 2018 Figure and What It Left Behind

The number that drew the most sustained attention was the one published in Pew's 2018 State of the News Media report: Google and Facebook together captured approximately 58 percent of all digital advertising revenue in the United States. The figure was derived from eMarketer data and cited alongside Bureau of Labor Statistics employment numbers showing newsroom employment had fallen by nearly 23 percent between 2008 and 2017 — a pairing that made the connection between platform dominance and editorial contraction difficult to dismiss as coincidental.

The 58 percent share meant that the remaining 42 percent was divided among every other participant in the digital advertising market: local television stations running pre-roll, magazine publishers selling programmatic display, newspapers with metered paywalls supplementing subscription revenue with advertising, podcasters, streaming services, and the long tail of independent digital outlets that had launched on the assumption that digital advertising could eventually replace what print had lost. It could not, because the premium of addressable, data-rich advertising increasingly sat inside Google's and Facebook's own environments rather than on the open web.

Craig Newmark's Craigslist had already taken classified advertising — historically around 40 percent of newspaper revenue at its peak — out of the print economy in the previous decade. What the Pew series documented between 2012 and 2018 was the simultaneous capture of the digital replacement by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg's respective platforms. Publishers were losing the old revenue and failing to capture the new one at the same time.

The Institute for Nonprofit News, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and other news nonprofits had partly insulated themselves from this dynamic by building foundation and donor revenue rather than relying on advertising. But the vast majority of American news organisations — regional dailies, alt-weeklies, digital-native outlets — remained advertising-dependent, and the Pew Research Center's State of the News Media annual fact sheets provided the most widely cited public accounting of exactly how much ground they had lost. The 2018 figure — 58 percent to two companies — was not the end of the series, but it represented the point at which the structural question stopped being whether a duopoly existed and became, instead, what the rest of journalism would do about it.