An article in Wired suggests Facebook and Google between them account for 77% of digital advertising. It’s not clear whether this is a US statistic only, or worldwide, but with Facebook claiming 2bn users a month and YouTube alone, 1.5bn, it hardly matters: their audience isn’t only US-based. What matters is they are huge when it comes to digital ad revenue, and trying to get bigger.
The article goes on to discuss how Verizon are keen to get a piece of that very attractive pie as their acquisition of Yahoo plus brands in their stable like the Huffington Post, Tumblr, Flickr, TechCrunch, and Engadget together now number some 1bn discrete users. Wired calls that 1bn number “table stakes” in digital these days. Wow.
But, even though most users are elsewhere (Facebook has more than 50% of its base outside the US), this is still a largely US story about US companies. When I talk about “the media”, usually it’s the English-speaking media that I mean. After all, it’s the language I do all my media consumption in. But I am beginning to realise there are a lot of other companies I never read about in my usual media diet that are probably just as interested in having a slice of Facebook and Google‘s pie as Verizon. Here, in research from Frontera, are some contenders that surprised me with the size of their monthly user bases:
- WeChat & Weixin: 963 million
- QQ: 850 million
- Weibo: 361 million
- VK.com: 95 million
- Odnoklassniki: 71 million
I used to work for a company that had a beer brand called Snow. Then, as now, it is the biggest selling beer in the world. According to Vinepair, enough of it is sold in China to “fill all of Manhattan with half a foot of beer”. These brands in non-English based markets are likely to be interesting challengers to the duopoly of Facebook and Google‘s digital ad dominance in time. I suspect they would be only too happy to take Manhattan.