The banner years are over: The fall of online display advertising
Back when the banner ad was king
The glory days of banners and sponsored content are well and truly over, according to the latest Internet Advertising Revenue Report from IAB Australia.
A total of $18.4b was spent on internet advertising in Australia during 2025, an 11.5% increase from 2024. Despite continued macroeconomic pressure, every sector of internet advertising rose from the year prior, albeit at varying rates.
Video advertising grew the most, up by 19.8% year-on-year, to sit at $5.4b. Search grew by 11.5% — keeping pace with the wider market as a whole — to reach $8b, which is a record.
Audio advertising jumped by 8.2%, bringing in $339m, while classifieds grew 5% to reach $2.9b.
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Display advertising grew by just 1.9%, to sit at $2.1b. While this figure excludes pop-up and pre-roll video (these are included in the overall ‘video’ section), it does include native advertising, paid sponsored content, and email display ads.
Overall, display advertising now accounts for just 11% of the total internet advertising market, a figure that has declined markedly over time.
When traced over the past six years, search and classified advertising has remained consistent in terms of share, while the fast growth of video advertising (from 18% of the total to 29%) has taken a chunk out of standard display advertising budgets, which sat at 19% of the total market in 2019.
Compounding this impact, the overall internet advertising market has almost doubled during that time, rising from $9.3b in 2019 to sit at $18.4b. While search advertising profits have doubled in that time despite the category percentage not growing in any meaningful way, display has moved from $1.77b in 2019 to just $2.1b in 2025.
Video advertising is eating into the humble display ad
This is bad news for traditional website publishers.
While the report notes that “growth in infeed/native and audio subsectors outweighs declines in standard display”, this only accounts for the 1.9% growth since in the past year.
A look at the ‘video’ advertising trends paints an even more sobering picture.
Of the $5.4b spent in video throughout 2025, $2.2b is spent on social media video advertising, a sector that grew by 35.1% in 12 months.
There was $500m spent across 7Plus, 9Now and 10Play, while $2.7b is shared between Youtube, Foxtel, SBS, and short form video on websites. While this sector isn’t broken down further, it can be reasonably assumed that website videos make up a much smaller percentage of this pot than Youtube.
In addition, while audio advertising still holds a modest percentage of total internet advertising with $339m, or 4.5%, podcast advertising grew by 13.5% year-on-year, outperforming the total internet advertising market in terms of annual growth.
Check out the full IAB report here.
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