Things have changed quite a lot in the past ten years when you look back to think back that it was actually around this time ten years ago that Twitter was started by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass. Be that as it may, times have changed and it feels as if PPC and other forms of advertising, especially social media marketing, are having to constantly adapt to take advantage of new emerging ways to get advertisement into online user’s lives. With this in mind, here are my main thoughts of where I think online advertising will go in the next 5-10 years because one thing is for certain: online advertising is going to keep changing.
#1 Emphasis on Social Media Advertising
It has become quite apparent that social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook are doing very well at the moment for the main reason that they have introduced advertising to their respective platforms. As people keep flooding onto these social media sites and the number of people using them increases, there is no denying that social media advertising is going to keep rocketing in popularity. For example, how often do people use search engines each day as opposed to keeping up to date on Twitter and Facebook? What more, the social media sites will provide contextual support for advertising since they know a lot about us from what we typed into our ‘About’ pages – the targeting that can be achieved on Facebook is surprisingly good even compared to PPC.
#2 Mobile will Dominate PPC
Mobile devices with access to internet will continually to exponentially grow. The thing is that tablets and mobiles are becoming increasingly convenient to use to search anything. They provide quick access to the internet and saves the hassle of having to have your laptop on all the time or on you in person. Therefore, you can expect that the competition for mobile PPC will increase as impressions that can be gained from mobile search engine results increase.
#3 PPC on Niche Devices?
This is a punt as it has every potential of not happening as it does of happening (basically, I am 50/50 on this one). Ten years, ago, PPC only existed on desktop computers. 5 years ago, it was predominantly on desktops and laptops. 
Nowadays, it is on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones – PPC expands based on what potential there is to advertise to on certain devices. If there are enough people that own certain devices, then it is a potential market that PPC could work in. For this reason, we may start to see PPC start to become introduced to the following devices once that have hit the public mainstream and have been sold in their millions:
- Smart watches
- VR headsets such as the Microsoft Hololens
- Android Auto and Apple CarPlay
When you think of the potential to introduce PPC to these devices, you can sometimes think, especially with smartwatches, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, why have they not been introduced yet. For example, you could be walking/driving past a store and an advertise bids to show a notification on your car or smartwatch telling you of a special offer that is available in store. The possibilities are endless for such emerging markets.
Laurent Malka
April 11, 2016 at 3:09 am
While I agree with most except perhaps the connected devices (future is bright, but still a long way to go), I would imagine that native advertising would be part of the equation. Indeed, not only adblockers have a “harder” time blocking those ads but those networks have exponentially increased their market share over the past years and will continue to thrive. But perhaps the more predominent reason is that content marketing is becoming an integral part of any online marketing campaign, whether b2b or b2c.
I would also add programatic advertising, which carries unfortunately a massive amount of fraud traffic, but is undeniably the most effective way to take advantage of big data and allow for granular ad personalization and targeting.
And yet, affiliates and independant online marketers, have limited access to programatic advertising, due to high costs involved and lack of easy to use management software.