Digital ad spending Asia 2019-2028
Digital advertising spending in Asia has grown rapidly in recent years, amounting to an estimated 257 billion U.S. dollars in 2024. A significant increase from around 125 billion dollars in 2019, digital ad spend in Asia was projected to continue its upward trajectory, set to reach an estimated 332 billion dollars by 2028.
Digital advertising on the rise
Many countries and territories in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly in East and Southeast Asia, already have high internet penetration rates of 70 percent and over. During the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers have increasingly turned to online channels for new product discovery and for purchasing said products. Advertisers in APAC have been capitalizing on this ongoing development for more than a decade, as ad spending for internet surpassed television ad spend in 2015, thus becoming the marketing medium with the highest advertising expenditure in the region.
Wasted ad spend
One of the leading risks for advertisers and advertising networks is ad fraud, leading to billions of dollars of wasted ad spend per year. Ad fraud generally refers to fraudulent activity in which scammers inflate ad engagement by using low-paid workers or bots, drawing financial gain from networks paying them based on ad impressions or clicks.
Tech giants Facebook and Google are among the platforms the highest ad spend is wasted on in APAC. The prevalence of advertising and bot fraud differs vastly across the region, being below one percent in some countries and territories and over ten percent in the countries most affected.