Digital marketing reached a significant scale in 2024: U.S. internet advertising revenue was $258.6 billion, while European digital advertising revenue reached €118.9 billion. By April 2025, 5.64 billion people were internet users worldwide, giving marketers a large but uneven audience across search, social platforms, video, and mobile devices.
Contents
- Digital advertising market size
- Where marketing budgets went
- Global internet and mobile reach
- Search behavior and discoverability
- Social media usage
- Platform reach and work-related activity
Digital advertising market size
The IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report: Full Year 2024 measured a $258.6 billion U.S. internet advertising market in 2024. Revenue grew 14.9% year over year, showing that digital advertising expanded even as marketers faced pressure to make limited budgets work harder.
Search remained the largest named category. Search advertising revenue reached $102.9 billion, up 15.9% year over year, and represented 39.8% of total U.S. internet advertising revenue. For professionals building a personal brand, this is a useful reminder that discoverability still includes being found when someone actively searches for an answer, service, employer, or specialist.
Video was another major growth area. Digital video ad revenue reached $62.1 billion in 2024, increased 19.2% year over year, and accounted for 24.0% of total U.S. internet ad revenue. The video growth rate was higher than the overall market growth rate, although the measures describe revenue growth rather than audience attention or campaign profitability.
The quarterly U.S. growth pattern was consistently positive:
| 2024 quarter | Year-over-year U.S. internet advertising revenue growth |
|---|---|
| Q1 | 15.7% |
| Q2 | 15.2% |
| Q3 | 14.7% |
| Q4 | 14.3% |
These quarterly figures come from the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report: Full Year 2024. They describe each quarter compared with the same quarter in 2023, not sequential quarter-to-quarter growth.
Europe also recorded substantial expansion. The IAB Europe AdEx Benchmark 2024 Report put European digital advertising revenue at €118.9 billion in 2024, up 16%. Digital channels accounted for 67.2% of all advertising spend in Europe. Twenty-one of 30 European markets achieved double-digit digital ad growth.
Several European channels grew faster than the overall European market. Social media advertising grew 23.9%, video advertising grew 24.5%, retail media grew 22.2%, programmatic advertising grew 18.4%, and digital audio grew 18.3%. The same report identified the UK as Europe’s top growth market, nearing €42 billion in digital ad revenue. Ukraine’s digital ad market grew 27.2%, while Serbia’s grew 24.8%.
Where marketing budgets went
The Gartner CMO Spend Survey found that average marketing budgets fell to 7.7% of overall company revenue in 2024. That was down from 9.1% in 2023 and below the 11% average recorded during the four years before the pandemic. Across the four years since the pandemic began, average marketing budgets were 8.2% of revenue.
The budget constraint was direct: 64% of CMOs said they lacked the budget to execute their 2024 strategy. At the same time, paid media investments rose to 27.9% of the marketing budget. Digital accounted for 57.1% of paid media budgets, up from 54.9% in 2023.
Within paid media, search took 13.6% of budgets, social advertising took 12.2%, and digital display advertising took 10.7%. These figures are shares of paid media budgets, so they should not be added to the overall marketing-budget percentage without additional information about how the survey categories are structured.
Offline channels still received substantial allocations. Event marketing took 17.1% of offline channel budgets, sponsorship took 16.4%, and television took 16.0%, according to the Gartner CMO Spend Survey. For a personal brand, the broader lesson is that digital does not operate in isolation: online visibility can coexist with events, sponsorships, and other relationship-building channels.
Global internet and mobile reach
The DataReportal Digital 2025 April Global Statshot estimated the global population at 8.21 billion at the start of April 2025. At that time, 58.2% of the world’s population lived in urban centers, and unique mobile users reached 5.81 billion, equal to 70.7% of the world’s population.
Smartphones accounted for roughly 87% of mobile handsets worldwide in April 2025. Internet users reached 5.64 billion, and internet penetration reached 68.7%. The remaining offline population was 2.57 billion people. These figures are estimates for a specific measurement point, not a claim that every person had equal access, connection quality, or ability to engage with marketing content.
Social media had a similarly broad but incomplete reach. Global social media user identities reached 5.31 billion in April 2025, representing 64.7% of the world’s population. DataReportal reported that 241 million new social media identities started using social platforms between April 2024 and April 2025.
For campaigns aimed at people who work online, device mix matters. DataReportal’s Digital 2025 Global Overview Report said 72.7% of American internet users still used computers to go online. In Europe, 75.5% of internet users still used laptops or desktops. Mobile-first creative is important, but these figures show why professional sites, portfolios, newsletters, and landing pages should remain usable on larger screens.
Search behavior and discoverability
Search remains a central route to information. The DataReportal Digital 2025 April Global Statshot reported that 81.5% of online adults used search engines each month. Among internet users aged 65 and above, 79.8% cited finding information as a primary reason for going online.
Search behavior varies by market. Monthly search-engine usage was below 80% in China at 64.9%, Egypt at 71.1%, Russia at 72.1%, and Japan at 74.9%. Outside China, 81.6% of online adults used Google each month. Google.com attracted more than 3 billion unique visitors each month, according to the same DataReportal global social media statistics source.
These numbers describe usage and visitor estimates, not guaranteed exposure for any individual website. For a personal brand, search visibility depends on the match between a person’s expertise and the questions an audience is already asking. A clear professional profile, useful explanatory content, and consistent terminology can help make that match easier to understand, but the statistics do not establish a particular ranking method or result.
Social media usage
The world spends over 15 billion hours consuming content on social platforms each day, according to DataReportal’s global social media statistics. The typical internet user spent 2 hours and 21 minutes on social media per day, and the global average number of social platforms used per month rose to 6.83.
Among adult internet users aged 16 and above, 56.3% reported using Facebook within the past month, 55.3% reported using YouTube, and 54.6% reported using Instagram. WhatsApp was used monthly by 54.4% of online adults, while 36.9% reported using Messenger at least once in the past 30 days.
Reported advertising reach provides another view of platform scale:
| Platform | Reported global advertising reach |
|---|---|
| YouTube | 2.65 billion users |
| 2.39 billion users | |
| TikTok | 2.21 billion users |
| 1.99 billion users | |
| 1.43 billion users |
These are reported ad-reach figures from DataReportal’s global social media statistics, not counts of unique people who necessarily saw an advertisement or used a platform during the same period. They are best read as indicators of potential scale.
DataReportal also reported that YouTube’s active app user base was indexed at 100 in a Similarweb ranking. WhatsApp’s active app user index was 87.4, Instagram’s was 80.5, Facebook’s active app user base equated to 75.7% of YouTube’s, and TikTok’s index was 67.4. Because the figures are indexed to YouTube, they compare relative app-user scale rather than reporting absolute user counts.
Platform reach and work-related activity
Social platforms are not used only for entertainment. The DataReportal Digital 2025 Global Overview Report found that 38.3% of active social media users said they used social platforms for work-related activities. That creates a meaningful context for professional education, career storytelling, expertise-led content, recruiting, and personal-brand communication.
Usage also differs by audience and purpose. Some 23.6% of adult social media users said finding sports content was a main reason they visited social platforms. Among male users aged 25 to 34, the figure was 30.1%; among female users, it was 16.7%. These figures are about sports content, but they illustrate why audience segmentation matters: a broad platform average can conceal substantial differences between demographic groups and interests.
Reddit’s reported ad reach changed sharply near the end of 2024. DataReportal reported a 129% increase in Reddit ads’ global reach in the final quarter of 2024, reaching 606 million users and close to 11% of the world’s internet users. Reddit’s reported global reach exceeded X’s 585.8 million users and was approaching Snapchat’s 708.7 million reported global reach. These are reported reach estimates, so the comparison should not be treated as a direct measure of engagement or influence.
The United States provides a more specific TikTok example. DataReportal reported close to 136 million active adult TikTok accounts in the U.S., representing roughly 8.5% of TikTok’s global ad audience. U.S. users spent an average of almost 44 hours per month using TikTok and opened the app about 9 times per day on average. Those estimates indicate frequent use, but they do not show whether usage translated into business outcomes for a particular creator or brand.
For people developing a personal brand and career presence, the most practical pattern across these statistics is a combination of broad reach and fragmented attention. Search offers intent-led discovery, video is a fast-growing advertising category, social platforms provide repeated exposure, and work-related social use creates room for professional content. The strongest channel choice still depends on the audience, geography, device habits, and measurable objective being pursued.