Programmatic advertising has become a major engine of U.S. digital media, but its scale comes with important questions about inventory quality, transaction costs and measurement. U.S. programmatic advertising revenue reached $162.4 billion in 2025, while industry benchmarks show both meaningful efficiency gains and continuing waste across the open web.
Table of contents
- Market size and revenue growth
- Formats and digital channels
- Connected TV buying and transaction mix
- Supply-chain scale and costs
- Media quality, waste and sustainability
- Measurement, transparency and performance
Market size and revenue growth
The U.S. programmatic advertising market grew substantially between 2021 and 2025. The IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report: Full Year 2025 reported the following annual revenue figures:
| Year | U.S. programmatic advertising revenue |
|---|---|
| 2021 | $99.0 billion |
| 2022 | $109.4 billion |
| 2023 | $114.2 billion |
| 2024 | $134.8 billion |
| 2025 | $162.4 billion |
The 2025 result was $27.6 billion higher than 2024. Revenue grew 20.5% year over year in 2025, following 18.0% growth in 2024. These figures describe U.S. programmatic advertising revenue for the stated calendar years; they are not global market estimates.
The same IAB/PwC report put non-programmatic placements, excluding search, at $18.0 billion in 2025. That segment declined 13.9% in 2025. The contrast helps explain why programmatic buying is increasingly central to digital advertising budgets: programmatic revenue expanded while the specified non-programmatic category contracted.
Formats and digital channels
Programmatic advertising sits within a broader digital advertising market that includes multiple formats and channels. Digital video advertising revenue grew 25.4% year over year in 2025, according to the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report: Full Year 2025. Total display advertising revenue reached $81.6 billion, increasing 9.8% from the previous year.
Several adjacent channels also recorded sizable 2025 totals:
- Social-media advertising revenue reached $117.7 billion, up 32.6% year over year.
- Commerce-media advertising revenue reached $63.4 billion, up 18.0% year over year.
- Podcast advertising revenue reached $2.9 billion, up 17.6% year over year.
These channel figures are broader format or channel measurements, so they should not be added to the programmatic revenue total. They provide context for the environments in which automated buying, audience targeting and data-driven optimization operate.
Video also showed a clear upward trajectory before the 2025 revenue report. The 2024 IAB Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report recorded U.S. digital-video ad spend of $54 billion in 2023 and projected $63 billion for 2024. The 2024 figure is a projection, not an actual measured result in that report, so it should be read separately from the 2023 actual.
Connected TV buying and transaction mix
Connected TV is one of the clearest examples of programmatic advertising moving into a traditionally premium video environment. In the 2024 IAB Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report, programmatic transactions accounted for three-fourths of CTV transactions in the 2024 buyer study. CTV buyers reported that 75% of CTV ad dollars were transacted programmatically in 2024.
Within programmatic CTV activation, the study reported this mix:
- Open-exchange or real-time-bidding activation: 36%.
- Private marketplace, preferred-deal and programmatic-guaranteed activation: 34%.
- Ad-network activation: 30%.
The study also presented an estimated distribution across all CTV advertising transactions in 2024. Open-exchange or DSP buying was expected to represent 28%, private marketplace, preferred-deal and programmatic-guaranteed buying 25%, publisher-direct buying 25%, and ad-network buying 22%.
Those percentages use different bases: the first set describes programmatic CTV activation, while the second describes estimated CTV advertising transactions overall. They should not be combined into one allocation.
Buyer behavior varied with spending direction. Among buyers increasing CTV spend, 58% used programmatic, compared with 36% of buyers keeping CTV spend flat. This survey result indicates that programmatic buying was more common among respondents expanding their CTV investment during the 2024 study period.
Supply-chain scale and costs
Programmatic scale also creates a complex supply chain. The ANA’s first look at its programmatic media transparency study valued the open-web programmatic media ecosystem at $88 billion in 2023 and estimated as much as $20 billion in waste. That estimated waste represented 23% of marketer investment in the ecosystem.
The ANA’s comprehensive programmatic media buying study found that buyers were using more than 40,000 websites in open-web programmatic buying. The ANA recommended selecting 75–100 trusted programmatic media sellers to access high-quality inventory. Its complete study identified a $22 billion efficiency opportunity in the $88 billion open-web programmatic marketplace.
The ANA cost waterfall showed where a programmatic dollar could be absorbed before reaching a consumer. Only 36 cents of each dollar entering a demand-side platform effectively reached the consumer. DSP and supply-side platform transaction costs accounted for 29% of each programmatic dollar, while non-viewable, invalid-traffic, non-measurable and made-for-advertising traffic accounted for 35%.
The 2023 findings are historical benchmarks and should not be treated as a current universal rate for every campaign, platform or inventory type.
Media quality, waste and sustainability
Later ANA benchmarks showed improvement, while continuing to identify material quality issues. The ANA 2024 Programmatic Benchmark Study described the open-web programmatic marketplace as a $104 billion market and translated its benchmark improvement into $8.2 billion of additional ad-spend productivity. For every $1,000 entering a DSP, 43.9% reached consumers in that benchmark.
The ANA reported a 7.9-percentage-point improvement in ad-spend efficiency and combined ad-spend productivity growth of 22% between its 2023 and 2024 studies. Participating marketers reduced made-for-advertising spend from 15% in 2023 to 6.2% in the 2024 benchmark. Median made-for-advertising spend fell from 10% to 1.1%, while the number of domains and apps in the benchmark fell from 44,000 to 22,634.
The ANA Q2 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark found that private marketplaces accounted for 87.8% of programmatic spend in the second quarter of 2025. The ANA TrueCPM Index declined from 37.8% to 36.5% compared with the prior quarter, and median made-for-advertising spend fell from 2.3% to 0.8%.
The same Q2 2025 benchmark measured carbon emissions per advertising dollar falling from 0.10 kg to 0.09 kg compared with the prior quarter. Open-marketplace programmatic buys were up to seven times more carbon-intensive than private-marketplace buys in that benchmark. The comparison is specific to the ANA’s Q2 2025 measurement and does not establish a universal emissions multiplier for all campaigns.
Measurement, transparency and performance
Efficiency is increasingly being measured by the quality and usefulness of impressions, not only by the amount of media purchased. In the ANA Q1 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark findings, participants directed 41% of programmatic budgets to effective ad impressions, compared with 36% in 2023.
The ANA Q3 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark reported a working-media share of 47.1%, representing $13.6 billion in recovered value. It also reported that 99.1% of programmatic ad spend occurred in low-risk environments. CTV represented 45.6% of programmatic spend in that benchmark, while CTV non-measurable impressions fell from 28% to 9.2% compared with the prior benchmark.
The ANA Q4 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark connected media quality with benchmark-qualified delivery. Quality-led advertisers converted 56.7% of programmatic spend into benchmark-qualified impressions in Q4 2025, versus 37.5% for lower-performing advertisers. The share of advertisers exceeding a 50% benchmark-qualified-spend threshold fell from 50.0% in Q3 to 43.8% in Q4 2025.
For advertisers comparing these measures, the denominator and observation period matter. A revenue total describes market activity, a transaction mix describes how inventory was bought, and a benchmark-qualified share describes the portion meeting a defined quality standard. They answer different planning questions and are most useful when paired with the source’s stated geography, sample and period.
Private marketplaces were especially prominent in the same Q4 2025 benchmark. They represented more than 92% of median programmatic spend across environments and 100% of CTV transactions. Together with the CTV, waste and effective-impression measures above, this suggests that transaction quality, measurable delivery and controlled supply paths were central themes in the latest ANA benchmarks. These are benchmark findings for participating advertisers and measured periods, not guarantees of performance for every advertiser.