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The company has spent the last few months continually revising upwards its forecasts due to growth in programmatic spending on connected TV, over-the-top (OTT) video and social video advertising. For the next few years, it expects the portion of programmatic spend that goes to video to remain steady. It also expects the current combined programmatic video ad revenues of social networks to account for roughly a third of total programmatic video ad spending. Much of this spend is being directed through mobile devices.

eMarketer includes the majority of social video in its definition of programmatic video as, it noted, platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat allow advertisers to transact via programmatic direct ad manager tools.

Within programmatic video, eMarketer observed, dollars allocated to mobile devices edge out dollars given to desktop, laptop or connected TV only slightly this year. It calculates that mobile’s share of programmatic video will peak in 2020 at 53.9%. By 2021, that is projected to fall as ad buyers ramp up investments in areas such as connected TV.

“The near 50-50 split of spending is an indicator of how eager buyers and sellers have become to capitalise on video advertising in any and all forms,” said eMarketer principal analyst Lauren Fisher. “And it also speaks to how quickly both sides have embraced programmatic as the primary method for buying and selling these ads.”

In its analysis of the programmatic market, eMarketer also forecast that 81.2% of total digital video spend will be transacted programmatically in 2019. This would be slightly less than the 84.9% of total digital display spend that will be transacted programmatically this year.