Canada is one of the leading countries in terms of advertising spend worldwide. Our digital ad spend market is expected to grow 3% annually, reaching an estimated $19.59 billion CAD in 2026.
This all sounds like good news… until you look at where the money actually goes.
The problem is that almost none of that value is staying in the country.
A recent report from Canadian Media Means Business (CMMB) illustrates just how little Canada stands to benefit from its own growing market: 94% of digital ad dollars go to non-Canadian platforms.
While we have a "successful" market on paper, we're not the ones enjoying that success. The figures are staggering and should catalyze us into envisioning a Canadian media industry that is working for Canada – not leaking value out of it.
A market leaking 94% of revenue can't be considered successful
Ninety-four cents of every Canadian digital ad spend dollar now leaves Canada. That means we're handing almost all of our ad dollars to companies that don't employ our people and frankly don't care whether Canadian media lives or dies.
At Narcity, we're loudly invested in the future of Canadian media. And as a leader of a Canadian company, it's been genuinely hard to witness this shift toward foreign platform reliance. While it may seem like the norm these days to advertise on global platforms (with Meta, Google, and Amazon dominating worldwide ad spend) it hasn't always been this way.
In 2017, foreign platforms took 76% of Canadian digital ad investment and domestic players held the other 24%. By 2024, those numbers changed to 94% foreign platform share and only 6% domestic.
In just under a decade, our market has been gutted. If the trend holds, forecasting puts the drain at something like $87 billion between 2026 and 2030.
That's a significant leak for our country, and one with major repercussions for our job market, cultural identity, and economic future.
Protecting Canadian media = protecting our workforce
I want to be clear: protecting Canadian media isn't about patriotism or sentimentality for our own homegrown success stories. Sure, at Narcity Media we're proud of our Canadian identity and we applaud our colleagues who are investing in the future of Canadian media.
But the rallying cry to support Canadian media goes well beyond that. Our workforce depends on it: roughly 200,000 jobs in this country rely on media and advertising. For context, that's more than in the auto, mining, or telecoms industries.
This structural erosion of our media industry affects more than just profit, it decimates our job market. According to CMMB, every million dollars of domestic ad spend supports 8.2 jobs. By that logic, the share we've given away already works out to 15,000+ jobs that could simply disappear.
We should refuse to accept this as the new normal for Canadian media.
Elbows up – except when it comes to our ad dollars
Thanks to the tense atmosphere with our southern neighbours, there's been a wave of Canadian nationalism. "Elbows up" has united the country to buy Canadian and protect what's ours.
So why do the elbows come down when it comes to ad dollars?
Small businesses default to advertising on Meta because it's easy. And honestly, fair enough when you're just trying to keep the doors open. Businesses want reach and Meta delivers in the short term. (In the long term, this over-reliance on performance marketing comes at the expense of brand health and market expansion.)
The part that's harder to explain is why our government is increasing its own ad spend on Facebook and Instagram year over year while talking about standing up for Canada.
The hypocrisy is blatant and it gets weirder the longer you look at it. For instance, Ottawa is running anti-tariff billboard campaigns across a dozen mostly-red American states. Maybe that moves a few minds down there (and maybe it doesn't), but we're spending public money to lecture Americans about protecting the Canadian economy while routing funds straight out of it.
Meanwhile, we've walked back the Digital Services Tax, which was officially repealed this past March.
There's a lot of pressure to play nice with our neighbours. But we're talking a big game about standing up for Canada while funding the platforms that are actively bleeding us dry.
What if we rewarded innovation over payroll?
In order to have a media ecosystem that competes on the global scale, we need more innovation. As a nation, we need to stop being deferential to global players as the ones always providing the best solutions.
This takes time and it takes capital. Canadian founders need to feel rewarded for the risk of truly innovating rather than just grappling to keep the lights on. Risk aversion is too often part of our cultural DNA, but it doesn't have to be.
Take, for instance, the government's current efforts to support Canadian media. The federal government has earmarked a vast sum of taxpayer money toward the Canadian journalism labour tax credit, which supports qualified Canadian journalism organizations (QCJOs) in covering newsroom salaries.
The problem with this model is that it subsidizes payroll rather than innovation.
Now hear me out: what if those hundreds of millions of dollars were instead put toward tax incentives for small businesses to advertise with domestic media? If each small Canadian business had $10K or $50K to play with toward advertising locally, think about the innovation that would follow.
The local ecosystem would be incentivized to provide the best digital platforms and advertising options, and the market would fight it out rather than settling into complacency. The cherry on top is that we'd be keeping advertising spend in-country – fostering our local economies while pushing us toward innovative solutions.
We've found ourselves in a major rut. But we don't need to get comfortable here, and we shouldn't. I've talked to many leaders who share the same optimism that a different Canadian media industry is possible.
We can keep playing it safe and funding our own decline. Or we can keep our elbows up where it counts and build something worth protecting.
It's easier than you think to drive attention and influence audiences across local and national platforms. Get in touch with us at Narcity Media to learn more.
Onwards,
Chuck