More money will be spent advertising on social media networks than on the entire TV ad market within two years, according to a new report.
The report predicts that Mark Zuckerberg will shake off any potential commercial impact from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, hoovering up more than four-fifths (84%, £2.76bn) of the predicted £3.3bn that will be spent on social media networks in the UK this year.
Facebook is also expected to weather the wider threat of a boycott by the world’s two biggest advertisers - Dove to Lynx maker Unilever and Pampers to Gillette owner Procter & Gamble - who say they have had enough of Facebook’s “swamp” of fake news, racism, sexism and extremism.
By 2020, Facebook will be making an estimated £3.8bn in UK ad spend – over a billion pounds more than this year – and just behind the value of the entire commercial TV market (£4.04bn): led by ITV, Channel 4, Sky and Channel 5.
A younger generation of digital-savvy consumers is fast emerging that has dramatically eroded the once unquestioned power of traditional television as the most important medium advertisers had to spend on in order to reach big audiences.
In 2010, a peak audience of almost 19 million viewers tuned in to watch Matt Cardle win the X Factor, the biggest show on British TV, capturing more than half the entire audience watching TV across the UK at the time.
Last year’s final saw the lowest ratings in the show’s history with less than 5 million tuning in to see Rak-Su win.
By comparison Facebook has amassed more than 2 billion active users per month; its sheer scale the very reason advertisers direct so much digital ad spending its way.
Such is Facebook’s power, advertisers believe they have little option but to spend with them in order to reach the digital-savvy audiences they crave to influence.
Facebook’s scale dwarfs would-be rivals with Twitter and Snapchat estimated to be set to pull in less than £300m (8%) of social network advertising spending between them this year. The spend on traditional TV advertising will remain comfortably ahead at £4bn this year.
Facebook is weathering a barrage of criticism over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which involved the harvesting of information from more than 50m Facebook profiles to target US voters without permission, including calls for users to delete their profiles in protest.
Analysts say there is little sign so far that a boycott of a size to commercially hurt the social network will take place.
“The social media juggernaut shows no signs of slowing down commercially,” said Bill Fisher, UK senior analyst at eMarketer. “You have the Cambridge Analytica Facebook privacy issue and it is difficult to know right now whether it will have a fundamental impact on user numbers. Until we see significant numbers of users coming off we are not going to see any drop in ad revenues. Advertisers follow eyeballs and there are plenty of eyeballs on social media.”
Emarketer’s report predicts growth in social media advertising will continue to surge, despite wider issues of potential advertiser boycotts over measurement, transparency and content issues such as fake news dogging Facebook.
Growth in social media ad spend will rocket 40%, some £1.3bn, between 2018 and 2020 from £3.29bn to £4.59bn, the report predicts.
By 2020, social media advertising will have passed traditional TV advertising by about £500m – £4.59bn compared to £4.04bn, it forecast. However, TV broadcasters are likely to increase revenuefrom their online TV services in the next few years, figures which are not covered by the eMarketer report.
“It is a tipping point reflecting consumer trends,” said Fisher. “But the fact that more and more consumers are on social media does not diminish the importance of broadcast TV per se. The television industry is also pivoting to digital to a degree as well, building revenues from their own digital services. Broadcast TV is still an incredibly important medium. We are forecasting a slight rise in our report, it is just that social media is just becoming an even more significant number.”
The report also shows that Facebook’s dominance over its rivals for social media advertising is likely to continue.
Facebook’s 82.5% share of social media advertising in 2020 is predicted to be only marginally less than this year (84%). This means rivals Snapchat and Twitter, which are forecast to increase their ad take from £260m to £478m over the next three years, will not have made a meaningful dent in Facebook’s position.
Overall, social media advertising spending is expected to grow from accounting for 25.4% of the total £12.98bn UK digital ad market this year, to just short of 30% of the £15.42bn market in 2020.