TheChek News Flow

The Information

Half of the world’s 10 biggest ad-selling companies in 2025 were headquartered in China.

Advertising was once primarily a subsidy for news and entertainment media, such as television, magazines and newspapers. Nowadays, it’s more of a subsidy for online services and increasingly for merchants looking to boost their razor-thin operating margins.

At the same time, Chinese firms have become a much bigger part of the market. Both trends are evident from a list of the 10 biggest global ad sellers—firms that make money by selling space on their sites to advertisers—compiled by WPP’s media-buying arm for calendar year 2025 (see the above chart).

The growth of digital advertising and the rise of Chinese firms together have made advertising much more of a global market, with marketers buying ads in countries far afield from where they’re based, using global media outlets.

Aside from the big U.S.-based ad giants, Google and Meta Platforms, the list includes four commerce firms, including Amazon and three Chinese firms—Alibaba, Temu parent PDD and JD.com. Other Chinese ad sellers include ByteDance, owner of Chinese video app Douyin, TikTok and TikTok Shop, WeChat owner Tencent and Chinese video service Kuaishou. The only other U.S. company on the list is Microsoft.

The data is drawn from both publicly available figures and WPP’s own estimates for companies such as ByteDance, which isn’t public, and others such as Microsoft, which don’t report their total ad revenue.

Two decades ago, the list would likely have been dominated by Western media and entertainment firms, with interests ranging from newspapers to magazines to television. No media companies make the list nowadays, although the pending merger of Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Skydance will restore at least that combined company to the list. Other big media firms, such as Walt Disney Co. and Comcast, are a bit smaller than the 10th biggest firm on the list, Kuaishou.

The shift highlights not only that internet firms have sucked up much of the advertising that was the lifeblood of traditional media, but that within the digital sector, retailers have followed Amazon’s lead in building big ad businesses on their websites. (Just last week, Walmart bought ad tech firm Vibe as part of its effort to build its advertising business.)

The shopping sites mainly generate their ad revenues from brands and merchants who spend money to get more visibility and target specific types of consumers on those shopping platforms.

The amount spent on retail media, as shopping sites are called, has jumped from $73 billion in 2020 to $175.7 billion last year, WPP estimates. It projects the category will grow to $265.6 billion by 2030.

China is the biggest part of that market, according to Kate Scott-Dawkins, global president of business intelligence at WPP Media. Spending on Chinese retail media was $77.6 billion last year, compared with $59.4 billion in the U.S. market.

Scott-Dawkins notes, however, that growth in the retail media market has slowed sharply in China, as social commerce sites—such as ByteDance’s TikTok Shop, where influencers pitch products for sale—gain momentum. Last year the Chinese retail media segment grew just 4.5%, less than half the 2024 growth rate, and WPP projects growth will slow to 2.8% this year.

One byproduct of the growth of internet companies selling ads on a global basis is that it is harder to measure the impact of advertising on individual countries’ economies, Scott-Dawkins says. A marketer in China can buy an ad to be shown in Brazil on an internet platform based in the U.S. The marketer pays for the ad in their home country. The ad doesn’t involve any money flowing into Brazil.

That is evident in Meta’s financial statements, which report revenue based both on where users are based and where customers are based. Meta’s first-quarter numbers, for instance, showed that companies based in Asia-Pacific generated $15.445 billion in revenue for Meta. But ads shown to users in Asia-Pacific accounted for only $10.6 billion in revenue.

That implies Asia-Pacific–based companies spent a lot of money targeting users in other parts of the world. Meanwhile, North American companies spent $21.267 billion on Meta advertising. But Meta reported that advertisers trying to reach North American users generated $23.7 billion in ad revenue. The bottom line is that conventional analysis that looks at ad spending as a percentage of GDP may no longer be accurate.

Indeed, ad spending is designed to prompt people to buy something, so the ads themselves may not involve money changing hands in a country—but they could spark economic activity in that country anyway.