Native Ad Plans Shift From Publishers To Social, Facebook Dominates By Wide Margin

by Joe Mandese , December 5, 2016

Digital publishers may have embraced “native” formats as a godsend for new advertising revenues, but the majority of ad execs are more keen on using the method on social media outlets vs. conventional content publishers. That’s the top-line finding of a new survey of advertisers and agency executives being released today by Advertiser Perceptions Inc., which suggests native advertising is reaching an inflection point that will soon be dominated primarily by social media.

The findings are based on an online survey asking ad executives to describer their current budgeting of native advertising, as well as their plans over the next 12 months. While conventional publishers currently dominate 2016 native advertising budgets, their share is eroding vs. social and so-called “programmatic” native advertising platforms.

Currently, ad execs estimate 43% of their native ad budgets are being allocated to conventional publishers, but that is down an average of 25% vs. 2015.

Social networks currently account for 39% of the respondents’ native ad budgets, but that is up 14% over 2015.

Programmatic native platforms currently account for 19% of native ad budgets. No change was reported.

While those estimates are self-reported, an even more troubling sign for traditional publishers’ native advertising outlook is the overall distribution of native advertising platform usage by respondents.

While 84% of respondents said they currently utilize social media for native advertising, only 60% said they were doing so with conventional publishers, and 47% said they were doing it with programmatic platforms.

“I guess it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, because native is indigenous to Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn an the like,” observes Kevin Mannion, chief strategy officer at Advertiser Perceptions.

Not surprisingly, Facebook dominated the list of the “top five” sources of native advertising among the ad executives by a wide margin, followed by the Google Display Network, BuzzFeed, YouTube and Yahoo.

4 comments about "Native Ad Plans Shift From Publishers To Social, Facebook Dominates By Wide Margin".

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Jonathan Hutter from Northern Light Health, December 5, 2016 at 10:56 a.m.
This makes sense, in that social media has very low standards related to "truthiness." Unfotunately a lot of native is in that realm.

At the same time, you have to wonder if advertisers are driven by access to an environment where standards of quality are not high; whether audiences are willing to accept whatever information confirms their current viewpoints; or where the method of distribution is just plain cheap.
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John Grono from GAP Research, December 5, 2016 at 5:07 p.m.

(d) All of the above.

Dyann Espinosa from IntraStasis, December 9, 2016 at 5:25 a.m.

No response to comments, Joe Mandese?

Joe Mandese from MediaPost Inc., December 9, 2016 at 7:11 a.m.

@Dyann Espinosa: I'm sorry, what's the question? This was a reported news story based on a source's research of industry execs. I don't have any more information about it or we would have reported it. I do have personal observations, if anyone would like to hear them, but this was not an editorial or commentary.