Digital vs traditional marketing statistics at a glance
| Category | Statistic | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Spend | US digital ad revenue hit $294.6B in 2025, up 13.9% | IAB / PwC, April 2026 |
| Spend | US TV, radio, print and out-of-home together took about $78B, 18.3% of US ad spending | EMARKETER, 2025 |
| Spend | Digital's share of US ad spend is 69% to 73% on IAB's audited revenue, against EMARKETER's implied 81.7% | IAB / PwC over EMARKETER and WPP Media totals, 2025 (computed) |
| Spend | US search ad revenue alone is 1.46 times all US traditional measured media combined | IAB / PwC and EMARKETER, 2025 (computed) |
| Growth | In 2025 internet advertising grew 13.9% while TV advertising fell 13.4% | PwC Entertainment & Media Outlook via IAB, April 2026 |
| Decline | US linear core TV ad revenue was forecast to fall 7% to $55.2B in 2025, with local stations down 22% | MoffettNathanson via MediaPost, November 2025 |
| Budgets | Digital is more than two thirds of CMOs' media investment in 2026, up 18% since 2024 | Gartner, May 2026 |
| Trust | For brand information people trust friends and family (82%) and someone like themselves (76%); celebrities sit at 42% | Edelman, June 2026 |
| Attention | Streaming took 48.6% of US TV viewing in May 2026; broadcast 19.2%, cable 20.4% | Nielsen, June 2026 |
| Cost | A Super Bowl LX spot cost about $80 per thousand viewers; Google search ads about $360 per thousand impressions | Nielsen, SportsPro, LocaliQ, 2026 (computed) |
How is US ad spend split between digital and traditional media?
Digital took roughly seven of every ten US ad dollars in 2025, at $294.6 billion of audited revenue against a total US ad market of $405 billion to $426 billion. It has led since it first passed traditional media in 2019.
| Year | US digital ad revenue | YoY growth | Search share of digital |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | $189.3B | n/a | 41.4% |
| 2022 | $209.7B | +10.8% | 40.2% |
| 2023 | $225.0B | +7.3% | 39.5% |
| 2024 | $258.6B | +14.9% | 39.8% |
| 2025 | $294.6B | +13.9% | 38.8% |
Source: IAB / PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, Full Year 2025 (April 2026). PwC collects revenue reported by the companies selling the advertising, plus public filings.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Social media advertising reached $117.7 billion in 2025, up 32.6%, passing search ($114.2 billion, up 11%) for the first time. | IAB / PwC, April 2026 |
| Digital video reached $78.0 billion, up 25.4%, and display $81.6 billion, up 9.8%. Programmatic buying accounted for $162.4 billion, up 20.5%, and commerce media for $63.4 billion, up 18%. | IAB / PwC, April 2026 |
| The top 10 companies hold 84.1% of US internet ad revenue, up 3.4 points since 2024. Companies ranked 11 to 25 hold 8.3%; everyone else holds 7.5%. | IAB / PwC, April 2026 |
| US total advertising revenue was forecast at $404.7 billion for 2025, up 5.6%, inside a global market of $1.08 trillion. | WPP Media, June 2025 |
| Pure-play digital took 73.2% of global advertising revenue in 2025. Counting digital extensions of traditional media (streaming TV, digital out-of-home, digital print) lifts it to 81.6%. | WPP Media, June 2025 |
| EMARKETER put US digital ad spending at $309.3 billion for 2024 on its wider definition. IAB's audited revenue figure for the same year is $258.6 billion. | EMARKETER, December 2024 |
| Digital first passed traditional media in the US in 2019, at 54.2% of ad spending against 45.8%. Traditional had held 51.4% a year earlier. This is a 2019 forecast, kept here as the crossover marker. | EMARKETER, February 2019 |
The 82% figure everyone quotes is a forecaster's estimate of spend. The $294.6 billion is money companies told an auditor they collected. The 50-billion-dollar gap between EMARKETER's 2024 digital number and IAB's is what that difference is worth. When someone hands me a digital share, I ask which side of the gap it came from, and whether the denominator includes direct mail, which EMARKETER's does not and which USPS alone bills $15.7 billion a year for.
What is happening to TV, radio, print and out-of-home advertising?
Traditional media is separating rather than collapsing as one block: television lost 13.4% of its advertising revenue in 2025 while out-of-home set a record and radio held roughly flat.
| Medium | 2025 revenue growth |
|---|---|
| Video games and esports | +22.0% |
| Internet advertising | +13.9% |
| B2B | +3.1% |
| Out-of-home | +2.2% |
| Music, radio and podcast | +1.3% |
| Newspaper and consumer magazine | -3.5% |
| TV advertising | -13.4% |
Source: PwC Entertainment & Media Outlook, in the IAB / PwC revenue report (April 2026). TV's fall reverses 6.6% growth in 2024, a year with both the Olympics and a US presidential election.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| US linear core TV ad revenue was forecast to fall 7% to $55.2 billion in 2025, with national cable down 10% to $20.3 billion and local stations down 22% to $16.9 billion. MoffettNathanson sells its research privately, so this is the figure as reported by MediaPost in November 2025, not an audited total. | MoffettNathanson via MediaPost, November 2025 |
| US out-of-home revenue reached a record $9.46 billion in 2025, up 3.6%, a nineteenth consecutive quarter of growth. | OAAA, March 2026 |
| Digital out-of-home is now 36.3% of US OOH revenue and grew 10.5%. Transit was the fastest segment at 9.2%. | OAAA, March 2026 |
| US radio advertising is about $10.31 billion in 2025, and radio still holds 48.1% of all time spent with audio. | EMARKETER, October 2025 |
| US print advertising is about $5.44 billion in 2025 and is forecast to fall a further 38% by 2029. | EMARKETER, October 2025 |
| US newspaper advertising revenue was $9.8 billion in 2022, down 5%, and 48% of it was already digital, up from 17% in 2011. | Pew Research Center, November 2023 |
| The largest US pay-TV providers, about 96% of the market, lost 5,035,000 net video subscribers in 2023. | Leichtman Research Group, March 2024 |
| USPS Marketing Mail brought in $15.73 billion in fiscal 2025 on 56.76 billion pieces, revenue up 2.3% on volume down 1.3%. | USPS, November 2025 |
Two of those numbers are old and I've kept them because nothing better exists. Pew's newspaper series stops at 2022 and Leichtman's pay-TV count at 2023. Use them for direction; the levels have moved since.
Out-of-home is the interesting one. It's the only legacy channel growing, and more than a third of its revenue is now digital screens. That tells you the split worth managing is addressable against unaddressable, and digital against traditional is the wrong cut. A billboard you can buy by daypart through a DSP behaves like display advertising with better weather. A 30-second cable spot doesn't, and its revenue is falling 10% a year.
How much of a marketing budget goes to digital vs traditional channels?
Digital now takes more than two thirds of CMOs' media investment, according to Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey of 401 marketing leaders, and paid media is the only budget line still growing.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Marketing budgets sit at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, up from 7.7% in 2025, across 401 CMOs surveyed in North America, the UK and Europe from January to March 2026. | Gartner, May 2026 |
| Paid media is 31.4% of the marketing budget in 2026, the largest and only growing category, funded partly by cuts to agencies. | Gartner, May 2026 |
| Digital media is more than two thirds of total media investment in 2026, up 18% since 2024. | Gartner, May 2026 |
| Digital channels took 61.1% of total marketing spend in Gartner's 2025 survey of 402 CMOs. That's a share of the whole marketing budget, not of media investment, so it doesn't line up against the two thirds figure above. | Gartner, June 2025 |
| 44% of marketers split their budget evenly between digital and traditional, in the 40% to 60% band. 32% prioritise traditional, and only 24% prioritise digital. | Nielsen, May 2025 |
| Only 32% of marketers globally measure media spending holistically across digital and traditional channels. In Europe it's 23%. | Nielsen, May 2025 |
Nielsen surveyed 1,400 marketers. Gartner's sit mostly at companies above $1 billion in revenue, which is why its digital share runs ahead of the market.
These two surveys disagree in a useful way. Gartner's enterprise CMOs put two thirds of media into digital, while Nielsen's wider sample says most marketers sit near a 50-50 split and more of them lean traditional than digital. Both can be true if the money is concentrated in a few very large advertisers, which the IAB's 84.1% figure suggests it is. The number I'd worry about is 32%: most marketers are splitting budget across digital and traditional without measuring the two together, so the split they report is a preference dressed up as a finding.
Which channels do people actually trust?
People trust other people first and paid media a long way second: Edelman's 2026 survey puts friends and family at 82% and someone like you at 76% as sources of brand information, with celebrities down at 42%.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 88% of consumers worldwide trust recommendations from people they know more than any other channel, from a September 2021 survey of over 40,000 consumers. Nielsen hasn't rerun it, so the number is five years old. | Nielsen, 2021 |
| For information about a brand, people trust friends and family (82%) and someone like themselves (76%), while celebrities sit at 42%. Fielded among 17,688 respondents in 15 countries between 23 April and 11 May 2026. | Edelman 2026 Trust Barometer, brands special report |
| US ad receptivity climbed to 58% in 2025 from 47% in 2024, across 21,300 consumers and 974 senior marketers in 30 markets. | Kantar, September 2025 |
| US consumers rank The New York Times, Amazon, Apple TV, Netflix and X as the ad environments they most welcome. Marketers rank YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, Instagram and Prime Video. | Kantar, September 2025 |
| 82% of US consumers said they trust print newspaper and magazine ads when making a purchase decision, against 61% for search engine ads and 25% for online pop-ups. The five most trusted channels were all traditional; the bottom eight were all digital. | MarketingSherpa, January 2017 |
The MarketingSherpa study surveyed 1,200 US consumers in October 2016. It's the most-cited number in this debate and it's nine years old, so give it a footnote and keep it off the slide.
Trust rankings are the weakest evidence on this page and the most quoted, which is a bad combination. Nobody has repeated MarketingSherpa's channel comparison since 2016, and stated trust has never predicted spend well anyway. What the current data supports is narrower: the trusted voice moved. Paid reach buys attention, and a person you already believe buys the decision.
Where is the attention, and where is the money?
Attention has moved to streaming and social video, and advertising followed it into the cheap tier: 68% of streaming subscribers now sit on an ad-supported plan, up from 46% in 2024.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Streaming took 48.6% of US TV viewing in May 2026. Broadcast held 19.2% and cable 20.4%. | Nielsen, June 2026 |
| Ad-supported content accounted for 71.5% of all US TV viewing in Q2 2026. Inside that, streaming took 48.2%, broadcast 26.6% and cable 25.2%. | Nielsen, August 2026 |
| 68% of streaming subscribers are on an ad-supported tier in 2026, up from 46% in 2024, across 3,575 US consumers surveyed in October and November 2025. | Deloitte, March 2026 |
| 52% of entertainment fans say social platforms are their main way of discovering new content, rising to 73% of Gen Z fans, and 44% then go elsewhere to watch or buy the full version. | Deloitte, March 2026 |
| 76% of Americans aged 12 and over, about 219 million people, listened to online audio in the past week. Among the over-55s, monthly online audio listening rose from 52% in 2024 to 70% in 2026. | Edison Research, Infinite Dial 2026 |
The tidy story is that attention left traditional media. The data says something more awkward: the ad model followed people into streaming and got bigger. Seven of every ten hours of American TV viewing carry advertising, and the fastest-growing part of that is a streaming tier people chose because it was cheaper. Television as a business is not dying. Linear distribution is, and it's taking the 30-second spot's pricing power with it.
What does it cost to reach a thousand people on each channel?
Reach is cheapest where targeting is worst: a Super Bowl spot costs about $80 per thousand viewers, direct mail postage costs about $277 per thousand pieces, and search ads cost about $360 per thousand impressions.
| Channel | Cost per thousand | Inputs |
|---|---|---|
| Super Bowl LX 30-second spot | $80 per 1,000 viewers | $10M per 30-second spot (SportsPro, February 2026) over 125.6M viewers (Nielsen, February 2026) |
| USPS Marketing Mail, postage only | $277 per 1,000 pieces | $15.73B revenue over 56.76B pieces (USPS, November 2025) |
| Google search ads | $360 per 1,000 impressions | $5.42 CPC at a 6.64% click-through rate (WordStream / LocaliQ, June 2026) |
These measure different things. A Super Bowl viewer is a person, a mail piece is an object, and a search impression is one ad slot on one query. NBCUniversal drove Super Bowl LX pricing past $10 million a spot, up from an $8 million average the year before, while the audience slipped from a record 127.7 million to 125.6 million. The postage figure excludes printing, creative and list costs, so a real mail piece lands well above $277, and the search figure multiplies two separate account averages. Read the ranking; the decimals will move.
Digital is efficient, which is not the same thing as cheap. The most expensive advertisement in America is also the cheapest way to put a message in front of a thousand people. What the extra $280 buys on search is that those thousand people asked for it. If your product has broad appeal and a weak intent signal, that premium stops making sense, which is why out-of-home is growing and why Amazon and Apple keep buying billboards.
Is digital spending less wasteful than traditional?
Nobody can settle that cleanly, because only digital gets audited: the ANA puts $26.8 billion of global media value lost each year to programmatic inefficiency, and no equivalent number exists for television or print.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| $26.8 billion in global media value is lost each year to programmatic inefficiencies. | ANA, August 2025 |
| The TrueCPM Index, the ANA's measure of programmatic efficiency, slipped from 37.8% to 36.5% between quarters. | ANA, August 2025 |
| Made-for-advertising sites are down to a median 0.8% of programmatic spend, from 15% two years earlier. Private marketplaces now carry 88% of programmatic spend and CTV is 44.2% of it. | ANA, August 2025 |
The made-for-advertising number is the most encouraging statistic here and nobody talks about it. Falling from 15% of spend to under 1% in two years is what happens when an industry body publishes an uncomfortable benchmark and buyers act on it. There's no equivalent audit for television or print, so the honest comparison is measured waste against unmeasured waste, and I'd rather have the number.
How we calculated the original numbers
Four figures on this page don't appear anywhere else. The arithmetic is below, so you can check it or swap the inputs.
- 69.1% to 72.8%: digital's real share of US ad spend in 2025. IAB and PwC report $294.6 billion of audited US digital ad revenue. EMARKETER puts traditional media at $78 billion and calls that 18.3% of US ad spending, implying a total of $426.2 billion; 294.6 / 426.2 = 69.1%. WPP Media forecasts the US market at $404.7 billion; 294.6 / 404.7 = 72.8%. EMARKETER's own implied digital share is 81.7%, because its definition of digital spending is wider than the revenue IAB's survey captures. The 2024 figures show the same gap in dollars: $309.3 billion on EMARKETER's definition against $258.6 billion on IAB's.
- 1.46x: US search advertising against all US traditional measured media. Search revenue of $114.2 billion (IAB / PwC, 2025) over $78 billion of TV, radio, print and out-of-home (EMARKETER, 2025) gives 1.46. Social alone gives 1.51, and the two together 2.97. EMARKETER's traditional total excludes direct mail.
- $36.0 billion versus $25.2 billion: one year of digital growth against three whole channels. Digital ad revenue rose from $258.6 billion in 2024 to $294.6 billion in 2025, a gain of $36.0 billion (IAB / PwC). US radio ($10.31B) plus print ($5.44B) from EMARKETER plus out-of-home ($9.46B) from the OAAA totals $25.21 billion. Digital added 1.43 times the entire size of those three markets in twelve months.
- $80, $277 and $360 per thousand. Super Bowl LX: NBCUniversal sold 30-second spots at more than $10,000,000, and $10,000,000 over 125.6 million viewers is $79.62 per thousand. The $8 million figure still circulating is the average price for the previous Super Bowl, which would put the LX spot at $63.69 per thousand. USPS Marketing Mail: $15,734 million of revenue over 56,756 million pieces is $0.2772 a piece, or $277.22 per thousand, postage only. Google search ads: 1,000 impressions at a 6.64% click-through rate produce 66.4 clicks, and at $5.42 a click that's $359.89.
What the 2026 numbers actually say
The digital share you quote depends on who counted. Between IAB's audited revenue and EMARKETER's spend estimate there's a 50-billion-dollar gap in one year, and it turns a 69% share into an 82% one. Neither is wrong. Pick the definition before you pick the number, and say which one you used.
Traditional media has split into two industries. Out-of-home grew, radio held, and television fell 13.4% in one year. The channels holding up either went addressable, like out-of-home at 36% digital, or sell something a screen can't. Linear TV is losing revenue faster than it's losing viewers, which is a pricing problem, not an audience problem.
Efficiency and cheapness are not the same purchase. A Super Bowl spot delivers a thousand people for $80, a search ad a thousand impressions for $360, and the search ad is usually still the better buy because those impressions asked a question. The trap is treating that premium as permanent. As intent gets absorbed by AI answers, the thing you're paying five times over for gets scarcer, and the broad-reach channels everyone has defunded for fifteen years start to look less silly.
FAQ
What percentage of advertising is digital vs traditional in 2026?
Digital took 69% to 73% of US ad spend in 2025, on IAB and PwC's audited revenue of $294.6 billion against published US market totals of $404.7 billion (WPP Media) and an implied $426.2 billion (EMARKETER). EMARKETER's own estimate is higher at 81.7%, because it counts more spending as digital than the IAB survey captures. Globally, WPP Media puts pure-play digital at 73.2% of ad revenue.
Is traditional marketing dead in 2026?
No, but it has split. In 2025 out-of-home grew 2.2% to a record $9.46 billion (OAAA) and music, radio and podcast grew 1.3%, while newspapers and consumer magazines fell 3.5% and TV advertising fell 13.4% (PwC Entertainment & Media Outlook). Television is the one genuinely losing money, faster than it's losing viewers.
How much does US TV advertising still make?
US linear core TV ad revenue was forecast at $55.2 billion for 2025, down 7%, with national cable at $20.3 billion and local stations at $16.9 billion (MoffettNathanson via MediaPost, November 2025). Advertising-supported streaming was forecast to grow 15% to $16.1 billion, so the money is moving inside television rather than leaving it.
Which is cheaper, digital or traditional advertising?
Per thousand people reached, traditional is cheaper. A 30-second Super Bowl LX spot cost about $80 per thousand viewers ($10 million over 125.6 million viewers, Nielsen and SportsPro, 2026), USPS Marketing Mail postage runs about $277 per thousand pieces (USPS fiscal 2025), and Google search ads about $360 per thousand impressions (LocaliQ, 2026). Digital wins on efficiency per outcome, not on price per impression.
Do people trust traditional ads more than digital ads?
The last channel-by-channel comparison, from MarketingSherpa in January 2017, found the five most trusted channels were all traditional (print at 82%) and the bottom eight all digital (search ads 61%, pop-ups 25%). That study is nine years old. Newer evidence points at people: in Edelman's 2026 survey celebrities score 42% as a source of brand information, while friends and family reach 82% and someone like you 76%.
How much of a marketing budget goes to digital channels?
Digital is more than two thirds of media investment for enterprise CMOs in 2026, up 18% since 2024, with paid media at 31.4% of the marketing budget (Gartner, 401 respondents, May 2026). Across a broader sample, Nielsen found 44% of marketers keep a near-even split, and more prioritise traditional (32%) than digital (24%).
Sources
- IAB / PwC, Internet Advertising Revenue Report: Full Year 2025 (April 2026)
- IAB, Digital Ad Revenue Climbs to Nearly $300B (April 2026)
- EMARKETER, Traditional media stays resilient despite digital dominance (October 2025)
- EMARKETER, US digital ad spend to exceed $300 billion in 2024 (December 2024)
- EMARKETER, US Digital Ad Spending Will Surpass Traditional in 2019 (February 2019)
- WPP Media, This Year Next Year mid-year global advertising forecast (June 2025)
- OAAA, Out of Home Advertising Revenue Reaches Record $9.46 Billion (March 2026)
- MoffettNathanson via MediaPost, Linear TV Ad Buys Forecast To Fall 7% In 2025 (November 2025)
- Pew Research Center, Newspapers Fact Sheet (November 2023)
- Leichtman Research Group, Major Pay-TV Providers Lost About 5,000,000 Subscribers in 2023 (March 2024)
- USPS, U.S. Postal Service Reports Fiscal Year 2025 Results (November 2025)
- Gartner, 2026 CMO Spend Survey (May 2026)
- Gartner, Digital Channels Account for 61.1% of Total Marketing Spend (June 2025)
- Nielsen, 2025 Annual Marketing Report (May 2025)
- Nielsen, The Gauge, May 2026 reports (June 2026)
- Nielsen, Q2 2026 Ad Supported Gauge (August 2026)
- Nielsen, Super Bowl LX final viewership (February 2026)
- Nielsen, Trust in Advertising study (2021)
- Kantar, US Media Reactions 2025 (September 2025)
- Edelman, 2026 Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Growth in an Insular World (June 2026)
- ANA, Q2 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark (August 2025)
- Deloitte, 2026 Digital Media Trends (March 2026)
- Edison Research, The Infinite Dial 2026 (March 2026)
- LocaliQ / WordStream, Search Advertising Benchmarks 2026 (June 2026)
- MarketingSherpa, Which advertising channels consumers trust most (January 2017)
- SportsPro, NBCUniversal sells Super Bowl LX ads for $10m (February 2026)
Methodology. Numbers were collected in September 2026 and checked against the original publisher's page, report or filing rather than against other roundups. Vendor claims with no stated sample or method were excluded. Where credible sources disagree, as EMARKETER and IAB do on the size of US digital advertising, both are shown with their definition. Gartner, Edelman and WordStream block automated requests: the Gartner figures were confirmed in the trade press coverage of the release, the WordStream benchmarks are cited to LocaliQ, which publishes the same study, and the Edelman figures were confirmed against the indexed text of the report page. The linear TV figures are MoffettNathanson forecasts as reported by MediaPost, because MoffettNathanson sells its research privately; they are labelled as forecasts in the text. Old numbers with no modern replacement (Pew 2022, Leichtman 2023, Nielsen's 2021 trust survey, the 2016 MarketingSherpa survey) are labelled in the text. Last updated 7 September 2026.