WPP’s media arm WPP Media has lowered its forecast for global ad revenue growth in 2025 to 6.0 percent in its latest ‘This Year Next Year’ report, its biannual report laying out the trends impacting advertising revenues in the coming years. The revision, down from a prediction of 7.7 percent in December’s forecast, is primarily due to continued disruptions to global trade caused in large part by policies from the current US government. The latest report predicts 6.1 percent growth in 2026, and a compound annual growth rate of 5.4 percent between 2025 and 2030 — which again represents a downgrade in expectations. WPP Media had previously projected a 6.4 percent compound annual growth rate between 2024-2029.
The new report predicts that ad revenues will continue to become more and more concentrated within a small number of major players. The top five sellers of advertising — Google, Meta, ByteDance, Amazon, and Alibaba — accounted for over 54 percent of all ad revenues in 2024, while the 25 biggest media sellers received more than 70 percent of total revenues.
At the same time, individual creators are set to pick up a growing share of ad spend (often while working with these same platforms). Creator ad revenues (including brand partnerships, sponsorships, and platform-based ad revenues) are predicted to hit $185 billion in 2025, growing to $377 billion by 2030. For context, WPP Media forecasts total global ad revenues will surpass $1.4 trillion by 2030.
Indeed, WPP Media expects this to be the first year in which ad revenues for user-generated content platforms exceed ad revenues on professionally produced content platforms (excluding China-based companies and revenues, but including TikTok). However Kate Scott-Dawkins, WPP Media’s global president on business intelligence, emphasised that lines dividing these types of platforms are blurry, given how professional media companies distribute content on UGC platforms, and vice versa.
Meanwhile streaming TV is expected to account for over a quarter of total TV ad revenues globally this year, and its rapid growth is projected to continue through to 2030. By this point, WPP Media forecasts streaming services will receive around 40 percent of total TV revenues.
A positive story for UK TV
Looking at the UK specifically, while growth expectations for the year have been downgraded, WPP Media has made a more moderate 0.5 percent revision to December’s figure. Full year growth for 2025 is now expected to hit 6.5 percent.
The wider economic instability has influenced this revision, as has upcoming regulation which will ban ads for unhealthy foods on TV before a 9pm watershed, alongside a total ban online. Linear TV has been hit with the largest revision since December. In its previous report, WPP Media forecasted a 2.8 percent drop in linear TV ad revenues this year, now that’s been downgraded to a 5.2 percent fall. Streaming TV revenues however are still projected to grow by 19.8 percent.
Indeed, streaming’s strength contributes to a somewhat positive picture for the total TV market. Ad revenues for TV as a whole are predicted to grow by 1.4 percent this year, and a further 2.3 percent next year. By 2030, WPP believes streaming platforms (which includes a portion of YouTube’s ad revenues) will collect over half of total TV ad revenues in the UK.
Expectations for 2030
This latest edition of the This Year Next Year report included research into industry experts’ expectations around how the advertising industry will operate in 2030. Sixty experts were asked to rate the likelihood of 20 potential scenarios for 2030 — highly unlikely, unlikely, likely, or highly likely. WPP Media asked the same questions five years ago, before the pandemic, and the findings demonstrate interesting shifts over the past five years in perceptions of where the industry is headed.
One of the biggest swings in expectations, unsurprisingly, relates to the use of AI in creating ad content. Back in 2020, under 40 percent of respondents thought it was likely that companies would rely on AI to produce the majority of creative content by 2030, now that figure has risen to over 70 percent.
That was the main scenario which experts feel more bullish about compared with 2020. There’s also been a slight increase in the proportion who think it’s likely that biometric data will be widely used to access, personalise, and secure services, and in the proportion who believe that today’s leading digital platform and social media companies will remain intact.
For many other potential scenarios, respondents are more sceptical than they were five years ago — in some cases dramatically so. In 2020, over 70 percent of those surveyed said it was likely that environmental impact would be as important as price for consumers in 2030. That figure has now fallen to just over 25 percent.
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