Yahoo: Native advertising skyrockets in first half

Native advertising has been considered the future of digital marketing, and it appears that future is already here.

Yahoo rolled out native advertising to third-part advertisers at the beginning of 2015, and the company has released new data to illustrate just how quickly is has caught on.

The company defines native advertising as “ads that match the look, feel and visual contest of the site where they are seen.” It notes that it is not branded content with an editorial voice.

According to its new data, Yahoo received 236.1 billion native ad requests in the U.S. during the first half of this year. That’s up 498 percent from 39.4 billion in first half 2015.

Ad requests are when a browser or app communicates with an ad server to display an ad.

Native ads grow even more globally

The growth of Yahoo’s native ad business grew even more throughout the rest of the world. In the first half of the year the company received 2.02 trillion native ad requests outside of the U.S. That was up more than 2,500 percent from 76.1 billion during the first six months of 2015.

In terms of native ad impressions, there were 23 billion in North America during the first half of the year. Asia-Pacific was second with 21 billion, followed by the EMEA region at 10 billion.

South America lagged behind a bit with 4 billion impressions.

Take a look at more native advertising trends from Yahoo below.

Tags: ad requests, digital advertising, digital marketing, native advertising, online advertising, yahoo