The Google-owned video content site YouTube is primed for a 50% surge in advertising revenue by the end of 2013, according to eMarketer. Acquired by search and tech giant Google in 2006 for $1.65bn, YouTube has more than one billion viewers every month and attracts about 20% of all advertising spending on US online video, with 80% of traffic coming from outside the U.S.

Market researchers eMarketer suggest that YouTube will account for a staggering 1.7% of the world's digital marketing spend, based on a variety of estimates and projections. Google do not release official revenue figures, though $1.96bn is the proposed net figure.


According to AdAge:

After revenue sharing, YouTube will take $850 million this year from video ads served in the U.S., which is up 50% from last year. Including display ads, YouTube will will net $1.08 billion this year in U.S. ad revenues. For context, that's still just 6.3% of all of Google's net U.S. ad revenues for the year, but 20.5% of the $4.15 billion U.S. online video ad market.

The video content more popular than ever before, it stands to reason that the growth of mobile and on-demand services will eventually match television, which remains the dominant medium for advertising revenues.