/ An inside look at the business of digital content
Advertising’s year of the better bet
Advertisers are redirecting billions toward the channels delivering measurable results. Understanding where those dollars are flowing now can help publishers protect revenue and position for future growth.
August 10, 2026 | By Kelly Killips, SVP of Marketing – MediaRadarConnect on
The biggest move in the market this past year wasn’t a bigger budget, it was a better bet. And for the platforms and publishers competing for that budget, understanding where the bet landed matters as much as the number itself.
Total U.S. media investment came in around $281 billion in 2025, according to MediaRadar’s Annual Investment Blueprint, up just 0.3% against 2024. That’s not really the headline however.
The headline is what happened underneath it: your clients moved real money, tens of billions of dollars, into the channels that were actually working for them, and pulled it out of the ones that weren’t. That’s the reallocation digital media leaders need to be tracking, since it’s a direct read on where advertiser demand, and the dollars behind it, are heading next. Digital alone accounted for 65% of the $281 billion, or $182 billion, and even that share hides a lot of movement. As the report frames it, this was the year of moving from scale to precision, an outcome-led mix rather than a broad one.
Social overtakes search, and it’s reshaping what advertisers expect from a platform.
The clearest example of a bet paying off: social hit $65.5 billion in 2025, up 9.9% year over year. It now sits at about 36% of all digital spend, and has officially passed search for the first time. And it was no small leap, either. Social was trailing search by $3.7 billion the year before. Now it leads by $4.1 billion.
That money had to come from somewhere, and a lot of it came out of search (down 3%) and display (down roughly 3.5%), two channels advertisers used to default to without a second thought. For platforms and publishers holding search or display inventory, that’s worth sitting with: it’s demand your clients aren’t bringing back on its own, and it points to where they’re expecting to find performance instead.
Video keeps compounding, and it’s where advertiser attention is consolidating.
Video was the other bet that paid off, spreading across formats rather than consolidating into one. Online video grew 6.7%. Mobile web video grew 5.5%. AVOD, streaming’s ad-supported side, grew 13% and now sits at $19.2 billion.
And as live games keep moving off linear and onto streaming, the role sports has to play in this shift can’t go unnoted: AVOD picks up the audience and the ad dollars that follow. It’s a trend worth watching closely: see how sports is reshaping the investment picture. Linear TV fell 7%, with cable, network, and local all down, and print dropped 22%. As the report puts it, your clients’ next dollar isn’t chasing reach anymore. It’s chasing attention, and that’s a design constraint worth building around.
What this means for digital media leaders going into the rest of the year.
MediaRadar’s analysis points to five signals worth planning around:
- Allocation is the real lever now on the buy side, so track where your clients’ spend is actually gaining share and build your platform or inventory strategy toward it.
- Social has passed search, meaning it’s now the benchmark advertisers are measuring every other platform and content environment against.
- Video is compounding across formats while static display slides, worth factoring into how you prioritize inventory and ad products.
- Search and display still hold value for advertisers seeking reach, but the growth budgets are moving to video: worth watching closely if that’s not where your inventory sits.
- The TV economy is moving to streaming, AVOD included, a structural shift in where your clients’ demand lives, not a temporary blip to wait out.
None of this means search or television are going away. Both are still enormous, still foundational, still where a lot of reach lives for your clients. But in this kind of market, every platform has to justify its role to the advertisers buying into it. The properties that keep growing will be the ones whose numbers give clients a reason to stay, not the ones coasting on what’s worked before.
The report’s own conclusion says it best: optimize, don’t expand. 2025 wasn’t the year advertisers spent more. It was the year the best bets got rewarded, on both sides of the transaction. Those platforms that understood where their clients’ attention was heading got ahead of it, while others raced to catch up or were left holding a positioning that no longer matched where the money actually went.
The signals are clear, the data’s available, and the digital media leaders who move now still have time to position ahead of where their clients’ spend is headed next. After all, placing better bets starts with better intelligence.
Full channel-by-channel breakdown, monthly trajectory data, and methodology available in MediaRadar's Annual Investment Blueprint: From Signal to Strategy.
About the author
Kelly Killips is the SVP of Marketing at MediaRadar, where she leads marketing strategy to drive brand growth. With 15+ years in creative direction and a decade of team leadership, she brings a data-driven approach honed across AdTech, B2B, and B2C campaigns—building collaborative teams and scalable creative that turns marketing intelligence into measurable impact.