The State of
Digital Media.

Where audiences went, where to plan, and what’s working in 2026. Four governing forces, five lenses on every channel, and a way to plan for one addressable ecosystem.

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The State of Digital Media 2026 — a MediaPath research report

Inside the
report.

Forty-eight pages on the forces dissolving channel boundaries, with every claim cited to a named source and a planning frame you can put in front of a client.

  • What changed. Four governing forces redrawing the market.
  • The channels. Five lenses: consumption, time, composition, measurability, fragmentation.
  • What to do. Planning for one addressable ecosystem in 2026.
48 pages · Published May 2026 · Free with a work email

What the 2026 report found.

Ten of the numbers the report is built on. The full context, the channel lenses, and the planning frame are in the PDF above.

$26.8BAnnual programmatic waste the supply-chain benchmark still finds.ANA/TAG TrustNet Benchmark, Q2 2025
$439 / $1,000Working media reaching consumers per $1,000 entering a DSP, up 7.9 points on the December 2023 baseline.ANA/TAG TrustNet Benchmark, Q2 2025
15% → 0.8%Made-for-advertising share of programmatic, 2023 baseline to the Q2 2025 managed median.ANA/TAG TrustNet, Q2 2025; baseline from the ANA Transparency Study, Dec 2023
64.5% → 87.8%Private marketplace share of programmatic spend across the same window.ANA/TAG TrustNet Benchmark, Q2 2025
47.5%Streaming’s share of US TV time, the highest the Gauge has recorded.Nielsen Gauge, December 2025
13.4%YouTube’s share of US TV viewing, the largest single-distributor lead since the Gauge launched.Nielsen Gauge, July 2025
$294.6BUS digital advertising revenue in 2025, up 13.9% year over year.IAB/PwC, published 2026 (FY2025 data)
46.9%Marketers rating MMM their most reliable cross-channel method, ahead of incrementality (34.1%) and last-click MTA (19.4%).eMarketer/TransUnion, July 2025
42.1%Year-over-year growth in off-site retail media, against 15.3% on-site.eMarketer Retail Media Forecast, H1 2026
Oct 17, 2025Google retires ten Privacy Sandbox technologies and leaves third-party cookies in Chrome; the identity rebuild continues regardless.Google, October 2025

More, kept current quarterly: programmatic advertising statistics for 2026 →

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