Five media owners attract more than 50% of all global ad spend

James McDonald, Alex Brownsell

Insights from WARC Media’s latest global advertising investment forecast.

The world’s top-five largest media owners - Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Alibaba and ByteDance - command more than 50% of all global ad investment, according to the latest WARC Media forecast. 

Alphabet is the world's largest media owner by ad revenue, accounting for a quarter of advertiser spend across a portfolio including Google Search, the Google Display Network and YouTube. 

This figure is before traffic acquisition costs (TAC) – money paid to publishers for hosting Google ads – and includes revenue from DoubleVerfiy, an ad tech component which does not make share calculations truly like-for-like. But, however sliced,...

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