Where Americans spend their time and where advertisers spend their money have come apart, and social media is the widest gap. Social platforms, particularly Meta, capture a disproportionate share of the nearly $500 billion US advertising market.

"Over the last 12 months, we've seen a flurry of [media advertising] activity from outside the retail sector," said our analyst Ethan Cramer-Flood on a recent episode of "Behind the Numbers."

EMARKETER's forecasts of US ad spending across all media channels, set against time spent data covering the roughly 13.5 hours of daily media consumption, show budgets tracking measurability rather than attention. Every medium except social gets less ad money than its share of time would suggest.

Social networks capture outsized ad dollars

Social media platforms collect nearly 30% of all US advertising dollars while commanding just 12.5% of adults' daily media time, the most dramatic imbalance across all media channels. Meta's Facebook and Instagram drive it.

Meta's Facebook and Instagram drive this discrepancy. "Nothing at all looks the way that Facebook and Instagram look in terms of just the staggering amount of ad revenue that they receive and how disproportionately large that is compared to the not actually all that impressive amount of time that we spend on those platforms," Cramer-Flood said.

The gap is widening. In 2022, social platforms captured 20% of ad spending against 11% of time spent. By 2026, EMARKETER forecasts social will claim 32% of ad dollars while time spent grows to just 13%.

Audience size is not what buys this share. Social media wins on return on ad spend (ROAS) and measurability. "It really comes down to flexibility as well as things like measurability," said Oscar Orozco, senior director of forecasting. Small and medium-sized businesses keep flocking to Meta's platforms, and competing social networks like Reddit, LinkedIn, and Pinterest "have not been able to really pull away budgets from Meta."

This is the only media category where ad spending share exceeds time spent share. Every other medium runs the other way.

Streaming services remain severely under-monetized

Subscription streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+ capture 16% of daily media time but receive only 3% of advertising dollars, and that gap keeps expanding. Netflix carries the largest monetization challenge among major streaming services: it has launched ad-supported tiers and seen strong adoption, yet it still cannot convert its audience into proportional ad revenue. HBO Max does better, and remains under-monetized against its audience engagement.

The streaming ad inventory exists and consumers are accepting it. "People are voting with their wallets," Cramer-Flood said. "They all say 'yeah, actually I'll accept ads in order to save some money.'"

Three structural problems keep the gap open. Measurement is not standardized: unlike linear TV with Nielsen ratings, streaming services operate as walled gardens with inconsistent metrics.

"There's an issue with a standardization of measurement. These are all still very much like walled gardens," Orozco said. Premium inventory pricing, though down from launch levels, still limits advertiser adoption. And competition from YouTube on connected TV (CTV) and free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) platforms fragments what is left. None of that resolves in a year.

"There's an issue with a standardization of measurement. These are all still very much like walled gardens," Orozco said. The gap will likely persist as these structural challenges take years to resolve.

The big screen loses ad share despite steady viewership

The television set is losing ad dollars without losing viewers. Combining linear TV and connected TV into "converged TV," the device captures 38% of media time but receives just 18% of ad spending, and that ad share is falling even as viewing time holds steady or grows slightly.

"No matter how much TV, technically linear TV declining, doesn't matter. CTV is more than making up for that. We're all still doing exactly what we used to do," Cramer-Flood said. "But that device's share of ad budget is spiraling downward as it spirals upward on our smartphones."

Advertisers are following mobile and social platforms even though Americans spend far more time with television screens, which leaves shoppable media on CTV as the obvious unclaimed ground.

"We used to shop more on our desktops and laptops because of the bigger screen. What about the CTV shoppable media there?" Orozco said. "That could be very much an untapped potential."

Listen to the full episode.

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