Social Native Ads To Overtake Traditional Display Ads

Social native ads – that is, ads that appear in users’ streams like organic content – are poised to overtake traditional social display ads in terms of industry spend. According to a recent report published through Business Insider, as publishers, media outlets, and social networks themselves reorganize and redesign their platforms around the prospect of driving revenue through native ads, native will come to represent over 40% of the total $10 billion in social media ad spend by 2017. On networks like Facebook and Pinterest, in-stream native advertisements will come to work seamlessly across devices and platforms, making mobile campaigns nearly indistinguishable from others. Breaking the data down to specific social networks, the Business Insider report claims that Facebook ads in news feeds achieve a click through rate 49 times that of traditional placements on the right side of users’ pages. The big takeaway, though, comes with respect to photo sharing: 43% of global internet users have shared a photo in the past month, and Business Insider seems to think that native photo advertisements on platforms like Vine and Snapchat will go a long way in the near future.