US programmatic digital display ad spending continued growing at double-digit rates during the pandemic, and we expect it to reach a milestone next year when more than 9 in 10 digital display ad dollars are transacted using some form of automation.
This forecast update, completed in May 2021, is a significant upward revision to our last set of estimates of US programmatic digital display ad spending, which we published in October 2020. Last October, we predicted US advertisers would spend $65.74 billion on programmatic digital display ads in 2020. We now estimate that they spent almost $10 billion more than that, $75.09 billion. The upward revision for this year is even greater—more than $15 billion.