Commentary
Streaming Upfront Media Dollar Share Climbs To 32%
- by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, May 14, 2025
TV upfront brand budgets are now allocating on average around one-third of the media schedules to streaming platforms, according to iSpot.
Linear TV advertising impressions are still at a high level.
Overall, linear TV advertising impressions continue to dominate the TV advertising ecosystem, representing an 85% share in March 2025 -- down from 92% in January 2023.
Over that period, all OTT/streaming ad impressions climbed to 14% share -- up from 6%.
In the first quarter of 2025, linear TV ad impressions were at 1.54 trillion -- down 4.3% from the year before.
National TV linear ad spending then was estimated to be up 4% compared to the year before.
On average, 32% of overall upfront TV advertising budgets go to streaming platforms, according to the TV advertising-focused measuring company -- with the top third of all TV upfront advertisers spending nearly half, or 48%.
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Upfront TV deals -- where brands buy for the full TV season ahead of time -- typically represent around 70% of all year-round national TV advertising.
Total year-round TV media deals include agreements made in the near-term scatter market.
The research here comes from a survey of 260 marketing executives representing 208 brands and media agencies.
Top individual brand categories for streaming platform media spend include travel -- where brands place 33% of their TV budgets -- home/real estate (26%), pharmaceutical/medical (24%), and restaurants (23%).
On the flip side, education (18%), retail (16%), insurance (16%), vehicles (13%), and entertainment (7%) are at relatively low share allocation to CTV.
One recommendation from the study is that all brands -- on average -- should shift 6.3% of the budgets to CTV to get better key performance indicators (KPIs) and decrease linear TV impressions.
More than three-quarters of media executives who buy streaming (80%) say they get reach and frequency data from platforms, while 61% say they get demographic data and 44%% get contextual/programming data.
With regard to "contextual" data, the report says this low level makes “it hard to optimize spend," adding: "This underscores the importance of unified, cross-platform measurement.”
Fifty-three percent of media-buying and brand executives say "business outcome" is the most "critical" data when making streaming TV buys, while 27% say it is "value" data, 11% say it is "verified ad delivery" and just 9% cite "program" data.
Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
Wayne, most of what is happening was decided in last year's upfront marketplace where streaming got about a third of the total dollars placed by national advertisers. These deals are still in force now. So this is not a new trend. What remains to be seen is how much will streaming gain in the upcoming negotiations for the 2025-26 TV season. Some of the things we at Media Dynamics Inc are watchinjg are the degree of commercialization on many streaming platforms--which we expect to increase, thereby promoting more ad revenues. On the other hand,buyers will keep pressing streaming ad time sellers to lower their CPM demands--as happened last year---which works against huge gains relative to linear TV.