TECHNOLOGY DOWN WITH THE AD DUOPOLY

For more than a half-decade, Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. have ruled the digital advertising market—the money machine that funds the modern internet. They’ve collected more than half of all online ad dollars, year after year, to the point that competitors and regulators feared there would be no realistic way to break their hold.

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This year the duo will have some of their biggest challenges yet, facing competition that’s fiercer and better funded than it’s been in a decade. Alphabet and Meta are still trying to recover from a change in Apple Inc.’s privacy policy that crippled the effectiveness of their ads on iPhones. This change has opened a window at a time when major competitors such as Amazon.com, Apple, Netflix, TikTok and Walmart are luring advertisers faster than ever. Meanwhile, a dicey economy has marketers skittish, leaving these formidable rivals fighting for a pile of money that no longer seems guaranteed to grow forever.

“We’re sitting in a world where the dominant market players from a few years ago don’t have the same growth forecast that they did historically,” says CJ Bangah, a PricewaterhouseCoopers principal focused on advertising. “You’re also seeing new providers enter the space and gobble up share very, very quickly.” She says this could “potentially yield a different slate of competitors coming out on top.”

Insider Intelligence estimates that Meta’s and Alphabet’s share of digital ad revenue in the US, the biggest market, was below 50% last year, the first time that’s happened since at least 2015. Meta posted its first two-quarters of revenue decline ever in 2022, and Alphabet’s sales missed analysts’ estimates three quarters in a row, its longest stretch of negative surprises since 2015. It projects them to continue losing ground in 2023.