The advertising industry, once primarily a revenue supplement for news and entertainment media like television, magazines, and newspapers, has evolved. Today, it serves as a core revenue pillar for various online services and is increasingly used by businesses to boost sales, albeit at the cost of squeezing already thin operating margins.
Concurrently, Chinese enterprises have significantly increased their influence in the advertising market. A list of the world's top ten advertising sales platforms for 2025, compiled by the media buying division of WPP, parent company of J. Walter Thompson, clearly illustrates two major industry trends.
The convergence of booming digital advertising and the rapid rise of Chinese companies highlights the growing globalization of the advertising sector. Brands can now leverage global internet platforms to place advertisements in countries beyond their home markets.
Apart from the two American advertising giants, Alphabet and Meta Platforms, Inc., the list features four e-commerce companies: Amazon and three Chinese firms: Alibaba, Pinduoduo (parent of Temu), and JD.com. The remaining Chinese advertising platforms on the list include: ByteDance, owner of Douyin, TikTok, and TikTok Shop; Tencent, owner of WeChat; and short-video platform Kuaishou. The only other U.S. company on the list is Microsoft.
This data consolidates public financial reports and WPP's estimates for private companies (like ByteDance) and those not separately disclosing total advertising revenue (like Microsoft).
Twenty years ago, such a list was dominated by European and American media and entertainment conglomerates with businesses spanning newspapers, magazines, and television. Today, no traditional media company ranks in the top ten, though the newly merged entity from Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global is expected to re-enter the list. The advertising scale of other major media firms like Disney and Comcast falls slightly below that of the tenth-ranked Kuaishou.
This shift in industry structure clearly demonstrates that internet companies have captured a significant portion of the advertising revenue that once sustained traditional media. Within the digital arena, major retail platforms, following Amazon's lead, have built massive advertising businesses leveraging their own online channels. (Just last week, Walmart acquired ad-tech firm Vibe to bolster its own advertising operations.)
Advertising revenue for e-commerce platforms primarily comes from major brands and small-to-medium merchants who pay for exposure to precisely reach their target consumer audiences.
Data from WPP estimates show the retail media advertising market surged from $73 billion in 2020 to $175.7 billion last year, with projections reaching $265.6 billion by 2030.
Kate Scott-Dawkins, Global President of Business Intelligence at WPP's media division, stated that China is the world's largest retail media advertising market. Last year, retail media ad spending in China reached $77.6 billion, far exceeding the $59.4 billion in the U.S. market.
However, she noted that with the strong emergence of social commerce platforms like ByteDance's TikTok Shop, the growth rate of China's retail media advertising has slowed significantly. Last year's industry growth was only 4.5%, less than half of 2024's rate. WPP forecasts this year's growth will further decelerate to 2.8%.
Scott-Dawkins pointed out that the global expansion of internet companies' advertising businesses has a secondary effect: it is becoming increasingly difficult to accurately measure advertising's contribution to any single national economy. For example, a Chinese company can place ads targeting Brazilian users on a U.S. internet platform. The advertising fee is settled within China, with no capital flowing into Brazil, yet it can stimulate consumption locally in Brazil.
Meta Platforms, Inc.'s financial reports vividly illustrate this phenomenon, as its revenue is reported both by the geographic location of its users and the location of its advertising clients. Taking its first-quarter report as an example: advertisers in the Asia-Pacific region generated $15.445 billion in revenue for Meta, but ads shown to users in the Asia-Pacific region brought in only $10.6 billion.
This indicates a significant number of Asia-Pacific businesses are advertising to other regions globally. Meanwhile, North American businesses spent $21.267 billion on Meta ads, while ad revenue from North American users reached $23.7 billion. This shows that traditional metrics, like using the ratio of advertising expenditure to GDP for industry analysis, are no longer precise.
At its core, the ultimate goal of advertising is to stimulate consumer transactions. Advertising fees may not involve capital flows in the target country, yet they can still drive local economic activity.
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