5 areas our analysts are watching in 2025: Regulation, search disruption, streaming churn, and more

2025 will be another year of disruption for digital advertising. With increasing threats from regulators—which could be impacted following Tuesday’s presidential election—and the rise of retail media and generative AI (genAI) in search, advertisers are shifting their ad placements. Plus, linear TV and even streamers face competition from creators. Here are five things our analysts said they were watching out for during last week’s EMARKETER Summit.

1. Digital advertising giants will be regulated

“Digital platforms are being heavily scrutinized by regulators from several different angles,” said our analyst Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf.

  • Big Tech (Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta) is on track to double its share of digital advertising from 30.8% at the beginning of our forecast period in 2008 to 66.8% next year, per our forecast.
  • As a result, a number of antitrust lawsuits from the US and abroad have been filed.

At the same time, regulators are working to protect children on digital platforms. With minors making up more than 15% of US users on YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok, the impacts on these platforms could be vast.

2. Traditional search will be threatened by retail, social, and genAI

Almost all search ad spend growth is coming from retail media, per our forecast. “Traditional search is slowing to a crawl,” said Mitchell-Wolf. Indeed, Amazon is the most popular platform for starting shopping online in the US, beating out traditional search engines, according to Jungle Scout data.

Retailers see the revenue benefit search can offer. “Retailers are innovating on their search functionality,” said our analyst Sarah Marzano. “With that, opportunities for monetization are going to evolve and expand.”

Social search ads and genAI players like ChatGPT and Perplexity also pose a threat to traditional search ad revenues. But Google isn’t going away. “Google’s status as the default search engine across most major browsers and devices will help protect its dominance,” Mitchell-Wolf said.

3. Retail media will face growing pains

Only 15.8% of US retail media ad spend goes to players that aren’t Amazon or Walmart, per our forecast. US retail media ad spend is growing, hitting $67.82 billion next year, but the number of players is also increasing, Marzano noted.

Advertisers are facing a lack of standardization, which makes it hard to buy ads and compare campaigns across platforms. Smaller retail media networks have an incentive to adopt standardization to be more attractive to advertisers, but those changes will take a while.

At the same time, in-store retail media is slow to take off. US in-store retail media ad spend will grow by 46.5% next year, but it will reach just $540 million and account for just 0.8% of overall retail media spend, per our forecast. High infrastructure costs, measurement challenges, and difficulties shifting trade budgets to digital formats all contribute to this slow crawl, said Marzano.

4. Streaming platforms struggle with churn

The number of original scripted series is declining. With less original content on each platform, consumers have less reason to keep up subscriptions long term.

As a result, many streamers are bundling with retail memberships and credit cards. “We’ll continue to see more of that next year,” said Mitchell-Wolf. “Whether a subscriber actually translates to time spent with the platform is sort of up in the air.”

5. Creators will get a boost

The fragmented, churn-addled video landscape is good news for creators, who can take advantage of free-to-use platforms where users are watching their content.

Next year, more people will watch YouTube and use social networks than will watch linear TV, per our forecast. Expect to see ad spend follow that trend, Mitchell-Wolf said.

Watch the full EMARKETER Summit here.

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