Donald Trump may be the “business President,” but he doesn’t want to take credit for this. For decades now the digital ad industry, since its inception, has been growing at quite remarkable rates. For years people have been wondering when the growth would slow down, but every time it appeared to be on the horizon, some new technology or feature would come out to boost the industry further into the future.
According to a new report from Standard Media Index, however, the growth rates may finally reaching a peak. In their report, it was found that digital ad spend went up by only 6% YoY for the first quarter of 2017. This marks the first time since measurements began that there has been single-digit growth in the first quarter.
Of course, the news wasn’t all bad for digital ads. Social advertising and video ads both shot up with more impressive growth. Social media advertising went up by 25.9% YoY, and video ads had an impressive showing with 28.2% growth.
Search engine advertising, which is one of the oldest forms of digital ads, only saw a 3.1% growth rate. This is a clear sign of slowing for one of the largest areas of online advertising. With growth at this level, some may wonder if this segment might actually see a negative growth rate at some point in the near future.
The less than impressive news from this report comes at a time when the economy as a whole is doing fairly well, so there isn’t really any way to look at this information other than that the overall growth is finally starting to slow.
Of course, there is still very impressive growth in other parts of the world, and it is never possible to predict if there will be some type of new development that pushes this industry forward again.
