Digital ad spend to decrease 5.5% in Europe this year

IAB Europe this week released the forecasts for media spend in Europe, and IAB Europe expects a contraction of 5.5% in the digital ad spend for 2020. The other media investments should decline 21.3%. IAB Europe explains the decrease in digital ad spend in Europe with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

Last month, IAB Ireland predicted that the digital ad spend will decrease 10 to 20%, this year, due to the impact of COVID-19. IAB Ireland says the digital ad spend will rebound in Q3/Q4 in 2020. Ezoic saw historic low CPMs in digital, back to levels of 2016.

Digital ad spend grew 12.3 percent in 2019

According to the IAB Europe AdEx Benchmark 2019 Study, the digital advertising grew 12.3 percent in 2019 to €64.8bn. IAB Europe says that on average €4bn has been added to the digital advertising market every year since 2006.

Last year, the top 10 countries by market size in Europe were:

1. UK – €21.4bn
2. Germany – €9.4bn
3. France – €6.1bn
4. Russia – €4.9bn
5. Italy – €3.2bn
6. Spain – €3.2bn
7. Sweden – €2.3bn
8. Netherlands – €2.3bn
9. Switzerland – €1.8bn
10. Norway – €1.3bn

And the top 5 growth markets were:

1. Serbia – 28.4 %
2. Ukraine – 28.0 %
3. Belarus – 25.2 %
4. Croatia – 22.3 %
5. Turkey– 19.1 %