Google Now Controls 12 Percent of All Global Media Spend
Nearly half of the companies in the report lost revenue
Alphabet—Google's reorganized holding company—is the world's largest media owner in the world, according to a new report from Zenith Media today.
Alphabet controls 12 percent of all global media spend, which primarily comes from Google and YouTube's ad sales. The company collects $60 billion in U.S. ad spend—a figure 166 percent larger than No. 2 ranking The Walt Disney Company. To compare, Google's ad revenue was 136 percent larger than Walt Disney last year. Alphabet's overall ad revenue is up 17 percent year-over-year.
Comcast, Twentieth Century Fox and Facebook round out the top five media owners in Zenith's "Top Thirty Global Media Owners" report.
Five digital players—Google, Facebook, Baidu, Yahoo and Microsoft—collectively generated 19 percent of all global ad budgets. And when looking specifically at digital money, the companies make up 65 percent of Internet revenue globally, with $88 billion in ad sales in the U.S. alone. According to Zenith, digital ad spend has grown 18 percent every year for the past five years while spend across all other types of media has grown .6 percent.
Facebook in particular continues to become an advertising juggernaut. The social network jumped from No. 10 in 2015 to No. 5 this year, making it the fastest-growing company on Zenith's list with 65 percent year-over-year growth. Chinese Internet company Baidu is the second fastest-growing company, with ad revenues up 52 percent.
While digital media owners continue to grow their business, the report points out that traditional media owners—particularly newspaper and magazine publishers—struggle to keep pace. Nearly half of the 30 companies featured in the report have lost media revenue in the past year.
"The traditional media owners in our top 30 ranking have been scrambling to scale up their own digital businesses, to various degrees of success," said Jonathan Barnard, head of forecasting at Zenith in a statement. "As digital ad technology—such as programmatic buying—spreads to traditional media, it will further shake up the businesses of traditional media owners, but also provide them with new opportunities for growth."
