While Facebook again signaled on its latest earnings call that the ad load in its core News Feed is approaching an upper limit, other social networks have more room to increase their ad load. According to a Forrester Data Consumer Technographics® survey fielded in January 2017 to 4,502 US youth between the ages of 12 and 17, only 11% responded that Instagram and Snapchat have too many ads, compared to 26% for Facebook. This implies that there is still room for social ad load and, consequently, social ad revenue to grow outside of Facebook.

Our survey also indicates that Facebook still has room to insert more midroll ads within videos without alienating users. While Facebook’s “too many ads” response rate of 26% is the highest among the core social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest – it is still below YouTube’s 39%. And despite the perception of too many ads on YouTube, the share of US youth using YouTube once a day or more is 22 percentage points higher than the next most used service – an indication that video viewers have a higher tolerance for video ads.

This is just one of several reasons we expect global social advertising spending to grow at a robust 18.2% CAGR over the next five years. For further detail on the factors driving growth and how growth will vary across countries and device types, please see our recently published social media advertising ForecastView reports:

And for more information on the tools that marketers can use to facilitate their social ad buys, see the recently published The Forrester Wave™: Social Advertising Technology, Q3 2017 and The Forrester Wave™: Social Media Management Solutions, Q2 2017.