The 5 Tech Companies to Watch in 2020

The US digital advertising industry has officially crossed the $100-billion mark, making it bigger than TV, radio and print media advertising. As this growth continues, a transformation is taking place within the industry, with the massive Google-Facebook advertising duopoly facing an existential challenge.

eMarketer is forecasting that the industry will top $170B by 2021. And with Google and Facebook currently hogging 60 percent of the market, American publishers and other media outlets are now fighting back. Google made $4.7 billion in revenue from news content in 2018, while the entire news industry together only netted $5.1 billion. That's over 2,000 news publishers combined.

Publishers everywhere are struggling. They're simply not growing at all. They're merely surviving. And it's all because of the mountains of first-party data that they're not collecting because they don't have a platform to monetize it. They're under immense pressure to grow ad revenues, yet they are beholden to the likes of Google. And while Google and Facebook are facing plenty of opposition, publishers won't wait for some legal loophole to fix all of their problems.

Their survival depends on the quiet rise of new content management and data-collection platforms that can rewrite the rules of who gets rich off of advertising. The future of publishing is designed to bypass the so-called digital giants, but in the meantime, there are also some other giant players encroaching on the digital ad duopoly.