Internet advertising passed half of Japan's ad spend in 2025

Japan spent ¥8.0623 trillion on advertising in 2025, according to Dentsu's annual estimate published on 5 March 2026. That is 105.1% of the year before and the fourth record in a row.

Internet advertising took ¥4.0459 trillion of it, up 10.8%. Its share of the total reached 50.2%. It was 45.5% two years earlier.

The four mass media of newspapers, magazines, radio and television came to ¥2.298 trillion, 98.4% of the year before. Television on its own was ¥1.7556 trillion, 99.7%. Television is flat. It did not collapse. Growth went elsewhere.

Where the internet money went

A detailed analysis by CARTA HOLDINGS, Dentsu, Dentsu Digital and Septeni, published the same day, breaks down the ¥3.3093 trillion spent on internet media, excluding production costs and ads on shopping platforms.

Video ads crossed ¥1 trillion for the first time and now make up more than 30% of internet media spend. Dentsu credits the demand for vertical video ads on social platforms and for connected TV, meaning televisions hooked up to the internet.

Social ads reached 39.5% of internet media spend. Within social, platforms classed as SNS took ¥550.8 billion and video sharing services ¥512.6 billion, and the analysis notes that video sharing's share rose again.

These two rows overlap. Video is a format and social is a type of platform, so a vertical video on a social feed counts in both. Adding them together gives a number that means nothing.

Search has not gone away. Search ads bought through auction were still the largest slice when spend is split by ad type and buying method, 38.7% of internet media spend.

Production grew more slowly than placement

One line in Dentsu's table is easy to miss. Internet production costs, the money spent making the ads, were ¥492.2 billion, up 4.0%. Internet media spend, the money spent placing them, rose 11.8%.

Dentsu links the production increase to a larger number of video ads being made. Even so, spending on slots grew almost three times as fast as spending on what goes in them.

For a small company this is the practical constraint. A vertical video ad is short and gets replaced often. The budget question stops being how much airtime to buy and becomes how many usable videos the company can produce in a month.

That is where UGC style content earns its place. Customer videos, staff filmed on a phone, a founder explaining the product in thirty seconds. They cost little to make, so a company can afford to make many and see which ones hold attention.

What 2026 looks like

The same analysis forecasts internet media spend of ¥3.584 trillion for 2026, up 8.3%, with video ads at ¥1.1783 trillion, up 14.7%.

Growth is slowing, from 11.8% to a forecast 8.3%. Video is still forecast to grow faster than the rest.

For a marketing lead choosing where the next yen goes, the direction has been the same for several years: toward video, toward social platforms, and toward formats that need a steady supply of new material rather than one polished spot a year.