Anybody who is online for any given amount of time will be able to tell after some time surfing the web that Google’s domination in the US search ad market is quite the beast. Thanks more specifically to mobile, Google will take 77.8 percent of the US search ad revenues this year. By next year, every time a dollar is spent on search ads in the US, 80 cents will go to Google. The remaining 20 will be split between Yahoo, Yelp, Microsoft, Ask and AOL. This information comes from eMarketer’s latest report on the US digital ad market.
“Google’s dominance in search, especially mobile search, is largely coming from the growing tendency of consumers to turn to their smartphones to look up everything from the details of a product to directions,” said eMarketer forecasting analyst Monica Peart. “Google and mobile search as a whole will continue to benefit from this behavioral shift.”
Search spending in the US, overall, is expected to rise 24 percent over the next three years, from $36.69 billion in 2017 to $45.63 billion in 2019.
For Microsoft’s US search ad revenues, they are expected to grow from $2.79 billion this year to $3.02 billion in 2019. Microsoft’s market share is expected to dip from 7.6 percent this year to 6.6 percent in 2019.
In regards to the strongest growth rates in search ad revenues in the US over the coming years, Yelp and Amazon are expected to see this type of growth. For Yelp’s local search app, it could crack $1 billion in search ad revenues in 2019, which would be up from $730 million this year. Its expected that its market share will slip from 6.9 percent to 5.8 percent in 2019. With product searches on Amazon, it could drive search advertising on the e-commerce channel up from $370 million this year to $600 million in 2019. Amazon could see a market share gain from 1.9 percent last year to 2.2 percent in 2019. Amazon was the only company that gained market share between 2016 and 2017 outside of Google.
