Technology Driving Revenues
The new research, Worldwide Digital Advertising: 2016-2020, found that despite the rising adoption of ad blockers, better audience targeting will drive higher click through rates and increase publisher revenues.
Research author Sam Barker added: Publishers, such as Facebook, are utilising their unprecedented audience knowledge to offer advertisers highly accurate targeting, thereby increasing the click through rates that advertisers are witnessing now. He added that publishers who are able to offer the most efficient targeting are set to become the most popular amongst advertisers.
The report highlighted that increased ad revenues will be further driven by faster real time bidding processes from exchanges such as the Rubicon Project and Fiksu. By streamlining the bidding process, page load times are reduced increasing the user experience.
Mobile Becomes the Biggest Platform
Last year saw ad revenues from mobile platforms surpassing those from online platforms, offering publishers the opportunity to capitalise on a sector that is both growing and has a comparatively low adoption of mobile ad blockers.
However, mobile ad blocking adoption is expected to increase over the next 5 years as users bring the benefits of the technology onto their mobile devices. The research also warned that publishers will have to contend with the introduction of network level ad blocking, currently being deployed by the UK mobile operator Three.