Content Advertising Projected To Be $50 Billion Market By 2021

Content advertising is projected to grow into a $50 billion market by 2021 -- up from $12.8 billion in 2016, according to projections from Polar, a content marketing platform for publishers. That’s a growth rate of 32% year-over-year, and more than 2x the growth rate of digital advertising as a whole.

Polar described content advertising as the amount of digital ad dollars spent by brands on content programs. Further, it said that content will comprise 14% of all digital based on the estimates. Polar estimated that the global ad market will grow from $590 billion this year to $775 billion in 2021, at a rate of 7% year-over-year growth. Digital advertising is expected to be 48% of the market, while mobile represents 78% of that total.

With a complex and ever-changing advertising ecosystem, Polar offered suggestions as to how marketers might allocate their digital dollars to implement content advertising programs:

For Native Advertising, 2017 Looks Like a Year of Clarity Two categories will emerge

Native advertising has been a broad and somewhat murky category—encompassing everything from advertorials to bespoke, custom units to content recommendation widgets and rewarded video ads that typically run inside mobile games—but 2017 will be the year that some clarity emerges, with the broad classification breaking down into two distinct types: programmatic and nonprogrammatic.

“A number of factors have driven interest in native, despite lingering confusion around the term,” said eMarketer analyst Lauren Fisher. Among the drivers: “The successes of in-feed platforms like Facebook, concerns about ad blocking and the growing acknowledgement that desktop-driven formats like banners just don’t cut it on mobile.”