At the recent Interactive Advertising Bureau’s 2013 Digital Content NewFronts conference in New York 75% of the senior executives attending said they plan to shift more of their advertising budget from television to digital video ads over the next year.
Total digital ad revenue is expected to be $117.6 billion world wide in 2013. Google is expected to earn $38.62 billion or almost one-third of the total according to eMarketer. The number two player will be Facebook which is expected to earn $6.36 billion.
According to Bloomberg Facebook will sell 15 second long television-style ads for as much as $2.5 million a day. "The [Facebook] commercials will initially be sold on a full-day basis and can only be targeted to users based on age and gender, according to the people. Facebook members won’t see a spot more than three times in a given day, the people said. Depending on how large an audience an advertiser plans to reach, the ads will range in price from $1 million to about $2.5 million a day."
Last October Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told investors during an earnings call that, “"Every night, 88 million to 100 million people are actively using Facebook during prime-time TV hours in the United States alone." Thus, she argued, online is a superior marketing venue to TV.
The mobile ad segment of this market is expected to be $16.65 billion in 2013 and eMarketer estimates that 53.17% of that revenue will go to Google.
For photographers the revenue Facebook is able to generate considering the new Shutterstock deal to make all of its content available
free of charge to Facebook advertisers. It is unclear whether the FREE deal includes the more than one-million video clips, or just the still images, that are available on Shutterstock. Creators will be paid their normal Shutterstock royalty rate when their images are used.
The Shutterstock deal with Facebook deal is likely to establish a precedent for pricing future uses of visual content in online ads. Other leaders in generating revenue from digital ads include: Yahoo!, Microsoft, IAC, AOL, Amazon, Pandora, Twitter, Linkedin, and Millennial Media.