Services such as Facebook Watch have driven US digital video advertising to new heights in 2018, with spend increasing by almost 30 per cent to $27.8 billion.

The latest figures from eMarketer also indicate that video will make up 25 per cent of all digital ad spend for the year, with Facebook (including Instagram) taking 24.5 per cent of video spend at $6.8 billion.

Moreover, eMarketer says Facebook takes 87 per cent of all US video ad spending on social networks, having experienced particular success with in-feed video ads.

eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson said Facebook will likely experience further success with in-stream video ads in Facebook Watch, which appear within the video player in the same way as TV commercials.

Perhaps most interestingly though, YouTube is well behind Facebook in terms of video ad spend, generating ‘just’ $3.4 billion in the US in 2018, up 17.1 percent from 2017.

Twitter is very much the poor relation, generating $633 million from video ads in 2018, while Snapchat will generate $397 million.