Google's dominance in digital advertising

I am simply re-blogging a recent newsletter by E-marketer that reports the digital ad revenue-shares of major players in the US. The key data can be seen in this table below. What is remarkable is how much Google is forecast to dominate the industry with even Facebook only a distant second. The report also forecasts Google to dominate in mobile as digital ad revenues are shifting there. 

Browser wars

I have written before about Browser wars on this blog: you can read it here. About a year ago, it became clear that Chrome is taking over the world as the most preferred browser. A recent post by The Economist confirms the trend with new data and a superb interactive chart showing the dominance of different browsers in the countries of the world at different points in time. The overall verdict is clear from the attached chart: Chrome is winning.

Global advertising spend 2

In an earlier post, I have reported global ad spend by type. The same data is available by region. No real surprises: About $340 billion of the global spend (roughly $500 billion) comes from the developed world (US, Europe and Japan). These markets are flat however, and most of the growth is coming from the developing world, especially China and Latin America, which grow at around 12%.

Media and the productivity debate

A few days ago, along with many other countries, the US has changed the way GDP is calculated. Details of the news as reported by The Economist can be seen here. The change is significant: about $560 billion or about 3% of the actual US GDP, which corresponds to roughly the size of the Swedish economy. What is really cool however, is that most of this increase in GDP comes from spending on innovations (patents) and copyrighted material, essentially from media.

This change should put in a totally different perspective the current debate over the loss of US productivity. Clearly, correctly accounting for these new, value-creating activities should boost the productivity of the US economy, especially if we compare it to the previous (so-called 'golden') period between WWII and 1970. The share of these activities has become much higher compared to the '50-60s period and thus, the productivity slowdown should be mitigated. The new measures should also provide better account for the contribution of IT to the economy, which was largely missed when working with the old measures implemented in 1945. I am curious to see to what extent will the media sector 'save' the productivity of the US economy?