For years, the playbook was straightforward: search for conversions, social for awareness. Two channels with separate budgets, separate KPIs, and roles that rarely overlapped.
A recent IAB report covered by Marketing Dive puts numbers to a shift many of us have felt building: social media generated $117.7 billion in advertising revenue in 2025, overtaking search ($114.2 billion) for the first time. Social grew 32.6% year-over-year. Search growth dropped by nearly 5 percentage points.
This is not a gradual trend. It is an inflection point that changes how we should think about digital marketing strategy.
Why social media is winning the budget race
The short answer: purchase decisions are increasingly made there. Social media is no longer just the awareness channel. It has become a performance channel as measurable as search, with one strategic advantage: it drives both brand recognition and conversions simultaneously.
The clearest signal is creator marketing. Three years ago, brands allocated influencer budgets as a nice-to-have experiment. In 2025, the creator economy reached $37 billion and is projected to hit $44 billion in 2026. IAB now classifies creator marketing as a core media channel, not a supplementary tactic. That distinction matters because it changes how media planners allocate spend.
What shifted? Measurability. Platforms invested heavily in attribution solutions. Today, a brand can track the complete path from a reel to a completed purchase with precision that did not exist three years ago. When data confirms ROI, budgets follow.
Video is amplifying this dynamic. Spending on video formats (CTV, social video, online video) grew 25.4% in 2025, reaching $78 billion. Video is no longer an optional creative format. It is the primary way content is consumed on social platforms, and algorithms consistently prioritize it.
When you combine structured creator marketing with a solid video strategy, you get a channel that does what search and display used to do separately: generates intent, builds trust, and converts. That is why 40% of the digital ad market now concentrates on social media.
The shift extends beyond traditional social. Gaming and esports advertising grew 22% in 2025, and commerce media (advertising on e-commerce platforms like Amazon or marketplace platforms) reached $63.4 billion. The channels where consumers spend time and make decisions are attracting the budgets. And those channels are increasingly not search.
Search is not dying, but the rules are changing
Context matters: search remains a $114 billion channel. It is not going away. But the dynamics have fundamentally shifted, and brands that treat search as their sole digital strategy pillar risk losing ground.
Two forces are at work simultaneously. First: AI Overviews and answers generated directly in search results are reducing organic clicks. Users get the information they need without visiting a website. That means less organic traffic for the same visibility.
The second force may be even more significant: Meta is projected to surpass Google in both U.S. and global digital ad revenue for the first time in 2026. This is more than a lab statistic. It signals that advertising budgets follow attention, and attention has moved to social platforms.
Over 50% of global web traffic is now estimated to come from bots, which further complicates the search landscape. When a significant portion of search queries and clicks are non-human, the channel’s reliability as a performance metric erodes. Social platforms, where engagement happens in authenticated environments, offer a cleaner signal of real human attention.
In our work with clients across the Romanian market, we see this pattern consistently. Many local businesses depend almost entirely on Google Ads and organic SEO. But consumer behavior in Romania mirrors the global trend: time spent on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube far exceeds time spent in search. Playing it safe with your marketing does not sell, and ignoring where your audience actually spends time costs even more.
In practice, we see more clients coming with the same question: why are Google Ads not delivering the same results as two years ago? The answer is rarely technical. Most often, their audience has changed behavior while the strategy stayed the same.
Market concentration adds another layer: the top 10 global platforms now control 84.1% of digital ad revenue, up 3.4% from last year. If your strategy does not include active presence on these platforms, you are effectively invisible to significant audience segments.
What to change in your strategy now
The first reaction to this data might be to shift budget from search to social. But these channels are not directly substitutable. What needs to change is how you think about distribution and each channel’s role.
Audit your current budget distribution. If more than 65% of your digital spend goes to search, test a progressive reallocation. Dedicate 15-20% to social media performance (not just awareness) and measure results over a minimum 90-day window.
Invest in structured creator marketing. Not ad-hoc budgets for one influencer per quarter, but medium-term partnerships with creators who understand your audience and can produce consistent content. The classic funnel no longer works precisely because purchase decisions happen in the feed, not on the search results page.
Treat video as a foundational format, not a creative bonus. If you do not have a video strategy adapted for each social platform where you are present, you are missing access to the fastest-growing channel in digital.
Measure differently. Search KPIs do not translate directly to social. In search you track CTR and CPC. In social media performance, you track cost per acquisition, ROAS on creator campaigns, and video’s impact on site conversion rates. Set up a measurement framework before moving budgets.
Monitor market concentration. If you depend on a single platform for most of your conversions, any algorithm change can disproportionately affect you. Diversification is not a strategic luxury. It is a protection mechanism.
The 2025 data confirms what we see in daily practice with our clients: purchase decisions are forming outside search more and more often. Creators, video, and social platforms are no longer auxiliary channels. They are the primary channel. A marketing strategy that does not reflect this loses ground every month.
