Looking at MarketerHire’s May 2021 hiring data, two big MoM trends popped out:

1. 📉 Paid social media marketers saw a steep drop in demand — their slice of the hiring pie shrank by half.
2. 📈 Paid search marketers saw a 50% increase in demand.

What happened to paid social?

Paid social definitely isn’t over — but to prep for Apple’s privacy update, tons of companies hired paid social marketers in April.

Most likely, everyone who needed a paid social media marketer in May already had one.

Why is paid search so popular?

It’s better positioned for the privacy-first internet than paid social. It hinges on first-party data: users typing their intent right into the search engine.

That’s appealing right now.

Our takeaway?

Paid search is hot — and that extends beyond search engines to Amazon’s searchable e-commerce interface.

Though they got lumped under “Other” above, Amazon marketers’ slice of our hiring pie doubled from April to May.

And who knows — paid Pinterest could be poised for a moment, too!