Google and Meta together have captured roughly half or more of US digital advertising spending for most of the past decade, per industry forecasts from eMarketer and IAB data — a share that peaked near 60 percent in the late 2010s and eased into the mid-40s by the mid-2020s as Amazon's ad business and TikTok grew. The strategic point for publishers is where the leakage went: almost none of it. The dollars that left the duopoly flowed to other walled gardens — Amazon above all, whose US ad revenues grew into the tens of billions — while the open web, where publisher display inventory lives, kept shrinking as a share of the whole. Understanding that structure explains most of publishing's advertising misery more precisely than any single complaint about platforms.
Licht Journal publishes information, not business advice; figures are from named industry forecasts and public company financials.
What are the actual numbers?
Annual industry forecasts (eMarketer's series is the standard citation) put total US digital ad spending above $300 billion by the mid-2020s. Within it, Google and Meta each report ad revenues publicly — Meta's worldwide ad revenue passed $160 billion in 2024 per its filings, and Alphabet's advertising revenue exceeded $260 billion that year per its own reports. The shares of the US total have declined modestly from peak, largely because Amazon's US ad business — built on search ads inside its store — grew from under $10 billion in 2020 to a run-rate several times that by the mid-2020s. Publishers' slice, the open-web display and video inventory sold via programmatic channels, is the residual: IAB's annual internet advertising revenue reports show publisher-side categories growing in single digits while the platform giants grow in double digits.
Why do platforms take the money?
Three structural reasons, none of them fixable by publisher effort. Targeting: logged-in platforms match ads to people; the open web matched ads to cookies, and Apple's App Tracking Transparency change in 2021 — which Meta said cost it an estimated $10 billion in 2022 alone, per its own statements — pushed spending further toward logged-in environments that survived the privacy reset. Transaction adjacency: Amazon shows ads at the moment of purchase, the most valuable instant in advertising; no publisher has that moment. And automation: the platforms' self-serve ad tools let millions of small businesses buy without sales calls; publisher direct sales cannot scale downmarket. The combination prices publisher inventory as a residual category, and the pricing shows in programmatic CPMs, which have stagnated for years across industry benchmarks.
What does this mean for a publisher's ad strategy?
Play where the structure allows a win, which is not volume display. The durable publisher ad lines are the ones the duopoly cannot productize: high-context sponsorships sold against a named section or newsletter, where the value is adjacency to a trusted vertical; first-party-data targeting on a publisher's own logged-in audience, which recreates the targeting advantage at the publisher's scale; and formats — native, events, branded content — where editorial trust is the raw material. Industry body estimates consistently show direct-sold and sponsorship revenue holding up far better than programmatic open exchange for publishers with real vertical audiences. The general rule: publishers win advertising where the sale requires understanding of the audience, and lose wherever the sale is purely a targeting transaction.
What generalizes — and what doesn't?
What generalizes: the duopoly structure is stable enough to plan around — a decade of antitrust litigation (including the US Justice Department's cases against Google, with a 2024 ruling finding Google maintained an illegal monopoly in search) has disciplined but not dismantled it, and planning for continued platform dominance of transactional ad dollars is the sober baseline. What does not generalize: total withdrawal from programmatic. The open exchange pays poorly at scale, but for small publishers it remains found money on inventory that would otherwise earn nothing, and the correct posture is to cap its share of effort, not eliminate the line. The strategic conclusion stands: advertising funds publishing best when the publisher, not the platform, is the thing the advertiser is buying.
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