50+ Targeted Advertising Statistics for 2026: Market Size, Platform Spend, and Privacy

Targeted advertising now moves the largest single share of ad dollars on the internet, and the numbers behind it changed more in the past eighteen months than in the five years before that.

This roundup of targeted advertising statistics covers Google's Privacy Sandbox shutdown, Meta's ad revenue on track to out-earn Google for the first time, and third-party cookies still sitting in Chrome despite six years of promises that they would disappear.

The global digital advertising market is projected to reach roughly $798.7 billion in 2025. This page covers where the money is going, which platforms are pulling ahead, how AI is reshaping targeting, and how consumers and regulators are pushing back.

Quick answer: The global digital advertising market is projected at $798.7 billion in 2025 (Statista), with Meta forecast to overtake Google in worldwide ad revenue for the first time in 2026 at $243.46 billion versus Google's $239.54 billion (eMarketer, 2026).

Key stats at a glance:

• $798.7 billion: projected global digital ad spend in 2025 (Statista Market Forecast, 2025)
• 62.3%: share of global digital ad spend held by Google, Meta, and Amazon combined in 2026 (eMarketer, 2026)
• 9.5%: forecast growth in US ad spend for 2026, up from 5.7% in 2025 (IAB 2026 Outlook Study)
• 29.5%: share of internet users worldwide who use an ad blocker at least sometimes as of Q2 2025 (GWI, via Backlinko)
• 81%: share of US adults who feel companies will use their data in ways they are not comfortable with (Pew Research Center, 2023)

Global Market Size and Growth

The advertising industry crossed into new territory this year, with digital spend, once treated as the "new" channel, now the default one that every other format is measured against.

1. The global digital advertising market is projected to reach $798.7 billion in 2025, with search advertising the largest single category at $334.4 billion. (Statista Market Forecast, 2025)
2. The United States remains the single largest market by ad spend, generating an estimated $325 billion of that global total in 2025. (Statista Market Forecast, 2025)
3. Grand View Research values the broader digital advertising market at $567.9 billion in 2025, projecting growth to $662.3 billion in 2026 and a 14.3% compound annual growth rate through 2033. (Grand View Research, 2026)
4. The IAB's 2026 Outlook Study, based on a survey of more than 200 US brand and agency buyers, forecasts 9.5% year-over-year growth in US ad spend for 2026, up from 5.7% growth in 2025. (IAB, January 2026)
5. Stripping out the effect of major cyclical events like the Winter Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, the IAB's underlying 2026 growth estimate for US ad spend falls to a range of 7.1% to 7.8%. (IAB, January 2026)

The gap between the two size estimates above is not a mistake. Statista and Grand View Research use different market definitions and data collection methods, which is common across ad-spend forecasting and worth flagging rather than averaging away.

Source	Global digital ad market estimate	Year	Scope or method note
Statista Market Forecast	$798.7 billion	2025	Statista's own market-outlook model, aggregate digital ad spend
Grand View Research	$567.9 billion (2025), $662.3 billion (2026)	2025–2026	Industry-report methodology combining IR filings and primary interviews

The overall pattern across every estimate points the same direction: double-digit growth, AI-driven buying replacing manual placement, and a market that is consolidating around a handful of platforms rather than fragmenting.

The Platform Giants: Google, Meta, and Amazon

Three companies now decide where most targeted-ad dollars land, and for the first time, the order between the top two is about to flip, according to Statista's Digital Advertising market forecast.

Much of that dominance rests on the same third-party tracking infrastructure that made targeted advertising possible in the first place, as documented on Wikipedia.

6. Meta is forecast to overtake Google in worldwide digital ad revenue for the first time in 2026, reaching $243.46 billion versus Google's $239.54 billion. (eMarketer, April 2026)
7. In 2025, Google still led with $214.06 billion in worldwide ad revenue against Meta's $196.17 billion, before Meta's accelerating growth rate closes the gap in 2026. (eMarketer, April 2026)
8. Meta's overall growth rate is projected to accelerate from 22.1% in 2025 to 24.1% in 2026, while Google's growth rate is expected to hold steady at 11.9%. (eMarketer, April 2026)
9. Amazon, the third-largest digital ad platform, earned $68.64 billion in worldwide ad revenue in 2025 and is projected to reach $82.07 billion in 2026 and $97.07 billion in 2027. (eMarketer, April 2026)
10. Amazon's share of global digital ad spend is projected to reach 9.0% in 2026, up from 8.0% in 2024. (eMarketer, April 2026)
11. Combined, Google, Meta, and Amazon are projected to account for 62.3% of total worldwide digital ad spend in 2026, a share expected to edge higher through 2028. (eMarketer, April 2026)
12. Outside the top three, ByteDance is projected to hold 7.9% of the global digital ad market in 2026, split between TikTok at 4.8% and Douyin at 3.1%. (eMarketer, April 2026)

Statista's independently tracked revenue figures for the same two companies come in noticeably higher than eMarketer's forecast, a reminder that "ad revenue" is measured differently depending on whether a source is tracking reported earnings or modeling a forward projection.

Source	Google 2025 ad revenue	Meta 2025 ad revenue	Method note
eMarketer	$214.06 billion	$196.17 billion	Forward-looking ad spend forecast model
Statista	Approximately $295 billion	Over $196 billion	Tracks reported digital advertising revenue across a broader revenue definition

For advertisers, the practical implication of this concentration is straightforward: budget decisions increasingly come down to three companies' targeting stacks rather than dozens of independent options, and losing access to any one of them carries outsized risk.

Programmatic, Mobile, and Video Ad Formats

Automated buying is no longer a growing trend inside digital advertising. It is close to the entire market.

13. Programmatic advertising accounts for nearly nine in ten digital display ad dollars worldwide in 2025, per eMarketer's own programmatic ad spending report. (eMarketer, 2025)
14. Worldwide programmatic display ad spending was projected to grow 14.6% in 2025, with growth rates varying meaningfully by country. (eMarketer, 2025)
15. US advertisers are projected to put 82% of their total media budget into digital channels in 2025, and to allocate 66% of that digital budget specifically to mobile. (eMarketer, March 2025)
16. Statista's Digital Advertising market forecast projects that 70% of total digital ad spending will be generated through mobile devices by 2028. (Statista Market Forecast, 2025)
17. The average projected ad spend per user in the in-app advertising segment is $68.30 in 2025. (Statista Market Forecast, 2025)
18. The IAB projects US digital video ad spend will grow 11% year over year in 2026, reaching $81.9 billion, based on its Digital Video Ad Spend and Strategy report. (IAB, 2026)
19. Digital video is projected to account for 61% of combined TV and video ad spend in 2026, compared with 39% for linear television. (IAB, 2026)
20. Growth in digital video ad spend is slowing from 21% year over year in 2022 to 15% in 2025 and a projected 11% in 2026, a sign the format is maturing rather than losing momentum. (IAB, 2026)

Connected TV Advertising

Streaming has pulled far enough ahead of linear television that the ad dollars are finally starting to follow the audience.

21. US connected TV ad spend reached an estimated $33.35 billion in 2025, and is projected to climb to roughly $37.95 billion in 2026, a growth rate of about 14%. (eMarketer, 2026, via MNTN Research and multiple eMarketer-sourced forecasts)
22. The IAB's 2026 Outlook Study, surveying 205 buy-side media investment executives, projects CTV ad spend growth of 13.8% year over year in 2026, the second-fastest of any channel behind social media. (IAB, 2026)
23. In 2026, US CTV upfront ad spend is projected to reach $17.73 billion, exceeding primetime linear TV upfront spend of $16.98 billion for the first time. (eMarketer, 2026)
24. eMarketer's own data shows connected TV captured 20.2% of time spent with media in 2025 but attracted only 7.7% of total ad spend, a gap the firm expects to keep widening before it narrows. (eMarketer, 2025)
25. An estimated 89.5% of US households owned at least one internet-connected TV device as of the most recent eMarketer forecast. (eMarketer, 2026)

The pattern across every CTV metric points the same direction: audiences moved to streaming years before ad budgets caught up, and the channel with the biggest gap between attention and spend is usually the one where the next round of budget growth lands.

Channel	2026 forecast growth	Source
Social media advertising	+14.6%	IAB 2026 Outlook Study
Connected TV	+13.8%	IAB 2026 Outlook Study
Commerce media	+12.1%	IAB 2026 Outlook Study
Linear television	-1.7%	IAB 2026 Outlook Study

Retail Media Networks

Retail media has become the ad channel almost every retailer wants to run, but the growth is concentrating in just two companies.

26. US retail media ad spend is projected to grow from $58.79 billion in 2025 to $69.33 billion in 2026. (eMarketer, 2026)
27. Of the projected $10.53 billion in incremental US retail media spending in 2026, $9.42 billion, or roughly 89%, is expected to go to just two companies: Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect. (eMarketer, 2026)
28. Amazon's retail media ad revenue is projected to exceed $60 billion in 2025 and approach $70 billion in 2026, according to a WARC Media forecast. (WARC Media, via eMarketer, 2025)
29. US off-site retail media ad spend, meaning ads that retailers place on other publishers' inventory using their own shopper data, grew 27.1% in 2025 to $13.52 billion, up from $10.64 billion the year before. (eMarketer, 2025)
30. Globally, commerce media reached $178.2 billion in 2025, or 15.6% of all advertising, overtaking total television revenue, including streaming, for the first time. (WPP Media, This Year Next Year report, December 2025)

Year	US retail media ad spend	Amazon + Walmart share of incremental growth
2025	$58.79 billion	Not separately reported
2026 (projected)	$69.33 billion	89% of the $10.53 billion increase

For brands outside the two largest retail media networks, this concentration means the "third wave" of digital advertising is arriving unevenly.

Budget is flowing overwhelmingly toward Amazon and Walmart, while the other roughly 275 retail media networks tracked globally are splitting a much smaller remainder.

AI in Targeted Advertising

AI moved from an experimental layer on top of ad platforms to the primary infrastructure most buyers now plan around.

31. The IAB's 2026 Outlook Study found that five of the top six areas of increased advertiser focus for 2026 are directly tied to AI, with two-thirds of surveyed buyers prioritizing agentic AI systems for autonomous campaign execution. (IAB, January 2026)
32. Cross-platform measurement rose to 72% as a stated buyer priority in the IAB's 2026 survey, up from 64% the year before, as advertisers try to connect AI-driven campaign execution back to measurable outcomes. (IAB, January 2026)
33. The IAB's separate State of Data 2025 report, based on a survey of more than 500 buy-side and sell-side industry professionals conducted with BWG Global and Transparent Partners, found that only 30% of agencies, brands, and publishers had fully integrated AI across the media campaign lifecycle as of 2025. (IAB, 2025)
34. Half of the organizations that had not yet fully integrated AI by 2025 expected to do so by 2026, according to the same IAB survey. (IAB, 2025)
35. A separate IAB Europe survey of nearly 100 advertisers, agencies, ad tech companies, and publishers found that 85% of companies already use AI-based tools for marketing, with nearly three-quarters confirming that at least one campaign function is AI-powered. (IAB Europe, 2025)

The consistent theme across all three surveys is a gap between stated intent and actual deployment.

Most of the industry says AI is now central to its 2026 planning, but full integration across the entire campaign lifecycle is still the exception rather than the norm.

Privacy Regulation and the Third-Party Cookie

The single biggest disruption anyone expected in targeted advertising, the death of the third-party cookie in Chrome, did not happen the way the industry planned for.

Every major browser vendor once planned to phase these out, a plan Google reversed for Chrome in July 2024.

36. Google officially ended its Privacy Sandbox initiative in October 2025 after six years of development, retiring most of the proposed cookie-replacement technologies, including Topics, Protected Audience, and Attribution Reporting. (Google, October 2025)
37. In April 2025, Google confirmed it would not introduce a separate user-facing prompt to manage third-party cookies in Chrome, meaning the browser continues to allow third-party cookies by default with no forced choice screen. (Google Privacy Sandbox blog, April 2025)
38. Chrome began deprecating the remaining Privacy Sandbox APIs starting with Chrome 144 in January 2026, with full removal targeted for Chrome 150 in July 2026. (Google, per multiple 2026 industry trackers)
39. Safari, Firefox, and Brave continue to block third-party cookies by default, meaning the "cookieless" experience the industry planned around for Chrome has effectively existed on those browsers for years already. (Multiple 2026 industry sources)
40. A May 2023 Pew Research Center survey of 5,101 US adults found that 81% believe the data companies collect about them will be used in ways they are not comfortable with. (Pew Research Center, 2023)
41. The same Pew Research Center survey found that 73% of US adults feel they have little to no control over what companies do with their personal data. (Pew Research Center, 2023)
42. According to the same May 2023 survey, 67% of US adults report turning off cookies or website tracking specifically to protect their online privacy, the second most common privacy action after adjusting social media settings. (Pew Research Center, 2023)

The regulatory story for 2026 is less about a single dramatic cutoff and more about a slow-moving fragmentation: different browsers now enforce different rules, and advertisers who built their targeting strategy around a single Chrome deadline are adjusting to a patchwork instead.

Ad Blocking and Consumer Pushback

Consumers did not wait for regulators to act. A meaningful share simply installed software to block targeted ads outright.

43. As of the second quarter of 2025, 29.5% of internet users worldwide reported using an ad blocker at least sometimes, an estimated 1.77 billion people. (GWI, via Backlinko, 2025)
44. In the United States specifically, GWI's Q2 2025 data puts ad blocker usage at 32.5% of internet users, higher than the global average. (GWI, via Backlinko, 2025)

Region	Ad blocker usage	Period
Global	29.5% of internet users (approx. 1.77 billion people)	Q2 2025
United States	32.5% of internet users	Q2 2025

For publishers and advertisers relying on targeted display and retargeting, this level of ad blocking represents a meaningful and growing share of inventory that never gets measured or monetized in the first place, independent of anything cookie or privacy regulation changes.

Consumer Attitudes Toward Targeted Ads, by Generation

Attitudes toward personalized advertising are not static, and they are not shifting the same way across every age group.

45. In a 2026 consumer survey run by Verve and reported by BYYD, 75% of respondents said they are willing to accept ads in exchange for free content, up from 67% in 2024. (BYYD/Verve, 2026)
46. The same survey found that 65% of respondents feel more in control of their privacy settings in 2026, a slight decline from 68% in 2024. (BYYD/Verve, 2026)
47. That overall privacy-confidence decline was not evenly distributed: confidence dropped by at least 10 percentage points among users aged 16 to 24 and among higher-income users aged 45 to 54, a steeper fall than the survey's general population figure. (BYYD/Verve, 2026)
48. Roughly three in four consumers, 76%, say they are more likely to pay attention to an ad when it is relevant to their interests. (BYYD/Verve, 2026)
49. Two-thirds of consumers surveyed, 65%, said they are more concerned than they were two years earlier about their data being used to train AI systems. (BYYD/Verve, 2026)
50. Nearly all respondents, 97%, said app publishers and advertising platforms need to provide more transparency about how consumer data is collected and used. (BYYD/Verve, 2026)

Attitude measured	2024	2026	Change
Willing to accept ads for free content	67%	75%	+8 points
Feel in control of privacy settings	68%	65%	-3 points

The generational split matters for anyone planning a targeting strategy: the youngest and one of the higher-income middle-age cohorts are losing confidence in their privacy controls faster than the population as a whole, even as overall tolerance for ad-supported free content is rising.

Benchmark Performance: Search vs. Display

Marketers evaluating whether targeted search or targeted display delivers better direct-response performance can compare both channels against the same large-sample benchmark.

Metric	Google Search ads	Google Display network ads
Click-through rate	6.66%	0.46%–0.57%
Conversion rate	7.52%	Not separately reported in this benchmark
Average cost per click	$5.26	Not separately reported in this benchmark
Average cost per lead	$70.11	Not separately reported in this benchmark

This benchmark is one of the few large-sample, methodologically transparent performance datasets publicly available in this space, since most of the "9x CTR" and "670% lift" claims circulating for targeted versus non-targeted advertising trace back to unnamed or unverifiable studies rather than a disclosed sample.

How These Targeted Advertising Statistics Were Compiled

Every figure in this article was checked against its original publisher rather than pulled from a competing listicle.

The source hierarchy followed was: primary releases from Google, the IAB, Pew Research Center, and GWI; the research organization's own published report where a primary release was not directly available (eMarketer, Statista, WARC Media, Grand View Research, WordStream); and named trade press reporting only where it directly cited one of those primary sources.

No figure traces back only to another statistics roundup. Figures are dated 2024 or later throughout, except where a comparison across years is the explicit point of the sentence. Where two credible sources reported materially different numbers for the same metric, both are shown side by side in a source-comparison table rather than merged into a single average.

A large share of commonly circulated "targeted advertising effectiveness" statistics, including generic click-through-rate multipliers and conversion-rate lift percentages, could not be traced to a named, disclosed-methodology source and were excluded rather than repeated.

This page will be reviewed and re-verified as new eMarketer, IAB, and Pew Research releases become available.

Conclusion

Two forces are reshaping targeted advertising at the same time, and they are pulling in opposite directions. On one side, spend keeps consolidating: Meta is about to overtake Google, three companies now control almost two-thirds of global digital ad dollars, and retail media growth is flowing almost entirely to Amazon and Walmart.

On the other side, the infrastructure that made fine-grained targeting possible is fraying: Google abandoned its cookie-replacement project after six years, nearly a third of internet users now block ads outright, and consumer trust in how their data gets used keeps declining, especially among younger users.

What this means going forward is that targeting precision and targeting permission are becoming two separate problems. Platforms with strong first-party data, Google, Meta, Amazon, and the retail media networks, are positioned to keep targeting effectively regardless of what happens to third-party cookies.

Everyone else is competing for a shrinking pool of trackable, willing audience, which is likely to keep pushing more ad budget toward the largest platforms rather than away from them.

FAQ

What do targeted advertising statistics show about the market size in 2025?

Statista's Digital Advertising market forecast puts the global digital advertising market, the large majority of which uses some form of targeting, at $798.7 billion in 2025, with search advertising the single largest category at $334.4 billion (Statista, 2025).

Is Meta really about to overtake Google in ad revenue?

Yes, according to eMarketer's April 2026 forecast. Meta is projected to reach $243.46 billion in worldwide ad revenue in 2026 versus Google's $239.54 billion, the first time Meta has been forecast to lead Google in both dollars and market share (eMarketer, 2026).

Did Google actually eliminate third-party cookies in Chrome?

No. Google ended its Privacy Sandbox initiative, the project meant to replace third-party cookies, in October 2025. Third-party cookies remain in Chrome, with no forced removal timeline, while Safari, Firefox, and Brave continue to block them by default (Google, 2025).

How many people use ad blockers?

As of the second quarter of 2025, 29.5% of internet users worldwide used an ad blocker at least sometimes, an estimated 1.77 billion people, with US usage running slightly higher at 32.5% (GWI, via Backlinko, 2025).

How central has AI become to ad targeting?

Very central in stated priorities, less so in actual deployment. The IAB's 2026 Outlook Study found five of the top six advertiser focus areas for 2026 are AI-related, but a separate 2025 IAB survey found only 30% of agencies, brands, and publishers had fully integrated AI across their campaign lifecycle (IAB, 2025 and 2026).

Do consumers trust targeted advertising with their data?

Largely no. A Pew Research Center survey of 5,101 US adults found 81% believe companies will use their data in ways they are uncomfortable with, and 73% feel they have little to no control over that data (Pew Research Center, 2023).