Web advertising to overtake TV in 2018

Internet advertising will overtake television in 2018, based on its current rate of growth, according to ZenithOptimedia’s new Advertising Expenditure Forecasts.

The research claims that internet advertising will account for 34.0% of global ad spend in 2017, slightly behind television’s 35.9%.

However, the market share gap between the two types of media will narrow from 13.3 percentage points in 2014 to 1.9 in 2017, and will see internet ad spend overtaking TV spend the year after.

At the same time, print ad spend is tipped to continue to decline across most of the world, shrinking by an average of 4.9% a year through to 2017.

In total, ZenithOptimedia forecasts that global ad spend will grow 4.0% to reach US$554bn in 2015, and will accelerate to 5.0% growth in 2016, boosted by the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio and the US Presidential elections. Ad spend is tipped to grow 4.4% in 2017.