Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary

Mar 23, 2024

Following on the FT’s reporting on March 15 that TikTok had $16 billion in US revenue, on Tuesday I explored what the implications might be if that’s actually how big the business is. My prior belief was – and current one is - that the ad revenue was probably closer to $6 billion. I explored what might be behind the numbers, implications of a $16 billion ad business and the discrepancy between the figures in this note.

Meanwhile, on Thursday WPP produced its 2023 annual report with incremental disclosures, and Accenture published its latest earnings. I analyzed incremental information from those two key players in the marketing services industry here.

Most importantly, I finalized (for now! Historical data gets better and evolves with age…) estimates for growth in the US advertising industry during the fourth quarter of 2023. With approximately 11% growth for the quarter and 6.2% growth for the year (excluding political advertising in both cases) we can conclude that the year was a good one. I introduced or refined new estimates on 4Q23 industry-wide ad revenues for overall digital advertising, commerce media, social media, search, open internet, national TV, local TV, connected TV, audio advertising, direct mail, outdoor, digital outdoor, political advertising and many other sectors.

Full subscribers can read details - including important quarterly growth benchmarks and rationales - here, but in short it’s important to point out that prior trends generally persisted in the most recent period. The only surprises will be to those individuals (many of them CEOs) who have been incorrectly stating or implying that the overall ad economy was struggling last year.

I also published a more detailed analysis of the outdoor industry on Wednesday, exploring some of the reasons by this medium, almost alone among “traditional” media has been growing in the recent past and why it is likely to do so for the foreseeable future.

Lastly, you can see my conversation from Thursday with Bloomberg Surveillance (at the 2:20 mark here) where we discussed Reddit, which completed an IPO this past week. Some of the research referenced on the show can be found here.