• by Wayne Friedman , February 14, 2025

Strong Roku "platform" revenue -- which comes largely from advertising sales -- grew 25% in the fourth quarter to $1.04 billion.

Much higher political advertising revenue -- due to the Presidential election -- helped lift the business to new heights. Taking out political, platform revenue was up 15% year-over-year.

Brian Wieser, media analyst at Madison & Wall, estimates the political advertising revenue share of all advertising revenue at Roku is 12%.

Small and medium-sized businesses contributed strongly to the bigger core, non-political advertising coffers during the period. Roku says. This also included ties to retail media, as well as big push from third party demand-side advertising platforms.

Roku sees another big revenue period for platform growth in the first quarter of 2025 -- rising 16%, as well as full-year 2025, with growth of 12%, and 15% when excluding political advertising.

Roku trimmed its net losses from operations by 62% in the fourth quarter -- and lowered to a loss of $39.1 million.

Total Roku-connected streaming households gained 12% from a year ago to 89.8 million. Total streaming hours for that period were up 18% to 34.1 billion.

The smaller part of Roku’s business -- devices -- was up 20% to $590 million in 2024. The company says its Roku TV operating system has been the number one TV operating system for the last six years in the U.S.

Roku TV OS-TV sets are now sold in Best Buy, Target, Walmart and on Amazon.

All Roku revenue -- including platform and device business -- was up 22% to $1.2 billion in the fourth quarter.

Roku average revenue per user (ARPU) grew 4% to $41.49 in the fourth quarter.