Commentary
Wieser Is Right: CTV Is Tiny Fraction Of Ads Viewed On TV
- by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, May 22, 2025
Noted Wall Street analyst and media research guru Brian Wieser of Madison & Wall just released a bombshell report on the state of linear and streaming advertising on TV. Analyzing an amalgamation of Nielsen viewing data, ad loads per service, and penetration rates of ad-supported streaming services published by Antenna, he writes that overall ad viewing on TV in the U.S. -- linear and streaming combined -- has fallen year over year.
Specifically, the share of advertising viewed as a share of all TV fell to 12.6% in Q1 2025, from 13.3% the year earlier. And in what is probably a surprise to all in the industry who get their industry perspective from press releases, headlines, and powerpoints at pay-to-play industry events, streaming ad viewing rose from 9.5% of all ad inventory on TV in April 2024 to 10.4% in April 2025.
Please reread the numbers in that sentence. Not only did streaming ad viewing as a share of all TV ad viewing rise by less than a single percentage point over the past year, but streaming still represents only 10% of all ad viewing on TV. This despite the fact that streaming represents 44% of all content viewing on TV (Nielsen Gauge). As we all know, most streaming TV viewing today is still on ad-free or ad-light services. Full stop.
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Everyone in advertising needs to wrap their head around these stats. Yes, this data includes all the FAST channels purportedly “flooding” the CTV market with new ad inventory. It includes Amazon Prime Video, which is “flooding” the market with new inventory.
According to Wieser, “The decline in available inventory is seemingly permanent -- it seems implausible that in on-demand environments consumers would ever tolerate ad loads even remotely close to what they are in linear environments. That means the vast majority of inventory will be in linear for a long time and at the same time, that total available tonnage falls.”
But many folks in the CTV ad world don’t seem to be paying attention to the macro numbers, preferring instead to live on the numbers coming off the programmatic CTV ad platforms, the demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms that offer up an almost infinite supply of low-priced streaming TV ad inventory daily. As Wieser noted, CTV ad spend now amounts to more than 31% of all ad spend on TV, a 3X gap between spend and viewing share.
Paradoxically, CTV ad pricing in the U.S. is dropping. In December 2024, eMarketer reported that “streaming inventory has grown so much lately that ad prices are falling.” When asking how this could be possible, it’s also impossible to ignore the elephant in the room: A portion of what is bought and sold as CTV ad inventory might not be what it is claimed or believed to be.
How much inventory is “out-stream” web video with sound off, mislabeled as high-quality “instream” video? How much is combining low-quality or mislabeled inventory in "audience extension" packages sold by branded CTV publishers? How much is outright fraud?
Whatever the case, our industry needs to come to grips with the fact that there are market dynamics and $10+ billion dollars of CTV ad spend that are not rationally connected to reality. Maybe more. Continuing to operate in willful ignorance of this fact helps no one, not the least those who matter most: consumers, advertisers, and quality publishers and programmers.
What do you think?
Dismayed but not shocked. So long as advertisers marketing heads and their advisors are afraid to find out, they will continue to be defrauded. Compared to this, any presumed Nielsen inaccuracy is but a blemish.
And the lack of response to your piece and anywhere else is deafeningly loud evidence of negligence or intentional disregard of the facts.
As Jack said, eye-opening but not surprising. An important consideration, however, is the need for marketers to reach viewers who are spending more time with ad-supported streaming platforms than with linear fare. From this perspective, CTV becomes a must-have in most video plans. Based on the the data that Brian W. reported, one would get the idea that CTV delivers limited incremental reach beyond linear. There's certainly not a lot of that's shared in the public domain about CTV reach extension, beyond sales and marketing kits. But we have heard a lot about excessive ad frequency in CTV campaigns, given the gaps in audience measurement when accounting for overlap across and within ad supported streamng platforms.
If streaming ads are 10.4% of all ad viewing how much incremental reach can it deliver? I'm guessing it's much higher for younger demos, but still ....
One combined measurement platform is the only way to make sure the next ad that airs delivers incremental reach against a target. With excessive frequency the norm for online video campaigns, after the first few CTV ads air there isn't much to gain. Seems to me if on average 30% of video ad dollars are spent on digital video, what's being bought is frequency -- especially by those who spend more than the average. Turner's Media at the Millennium had so brilliantly shown this once before. What is old is new again.
Dave, the new Nielsen report on CTV and linear TV ad-supported viewing had CTV's share just over 30%. As you and I both know, the average ad load on CTV is way lower than on linear TV but that 10% figure seems rather hard to buy--unless Nielsen is wrong and ad-supported steraming's share of "TV" viewing is only 20% Or, perhaps, Brian is too low on his estimate of the relative disparity in ad loads between the two platformss. Or, maybe, he is including digital video in his "TV" calculations. I don't know. We figure strteaming's share of TV ad GRPs as being somewhere between 17% and 20%, depending on what assumptions and sources you use.
Jack, an advertiser who is interested in reaching a balanced spread of young, middle aged and older consumers can add siignificant reach among the younger age groups by including streaming in the media mix--along with linear. That 10% figure--or mine ( 17-20% )--- merely defines tha totality of ad "viewing" that is taking place, not the amount of reach that a given ad schedule or media mix can attain.
Correction on my comment about Nielsen's new Gauge--streaming's share of ad-supported viewing was 28%,not "just over 30%".
Ed, When you look at second by second viewing data from tens of millions of smart TVs, you find that while households may watch some of ad-supporrted streaming services on a monthly basis, a large portion of them watch with ad avoidance in mind and see very, very few ads. While the theoritical reach of ad-supported streaming services is 28%, the effective reach that can be dlievered is much lower. Comscore, which also counts actual ad viewing pegs it as 14%. There is no data fram any direct source or panel out there that I have seen that shows it at 20%.
Dave, Comscore uses a big data panel of set top box TV sets to get its data. Which may reflect only what happens in "pay TV" homes, not those which use OTA or broadband -only for their TV. In any event, nobody--Comscore or Nielsen--measures "viewing"on a second by second basis--it's only that the set is on and a commercial is on-screen.
As regards streaming's reach potential, we know that a significant percentage of streaming households use ad-supported services--latest figures are around 70-75% and we know that 85%+ of all TV homes have streaming capability. So it's very hard for me to believe that ad-supported CTV has a reach potential of only 28%.
It is quite possible that advertisers who rely on CPM-fixated programmatic buys are not dspersing their schedules among many sellers--in order to get the lowest CPMs. Hence, they may have a reach problem, especially if fraud is rampant. But I don't think that this problem is of great magnitude for more sophisticated direct buys made in behalf of savvy national advertisers who deal mainly with the top ad-supported services--Disney+, Paramount+, Amazon, Netflix, etc.
Regarding the exact percentages, if we buy Nielsen's figure for ad-supported CTV viewing that should translate to about 20% of all ad GRPs, but if the actual viewing share is lower, you would get a lower estimate--like our original estimate of 17% or comacore's tally of 14%. All three of these percentages are well below the share of viewing, so we agree on that key point. A lot of streaming activity is not ad-supported. How much is the question.
Hi Dave. Feels to me that the claim that “most streaming TV viewing is on ad-free or ad-light services” is outdated. May 1st THR article: Nielsen data shows 72.4% of total TV viewing in Q1 2025 was on ad-supported platforms, with 70% of streaming viewership involving ads, indicating ad-supported streaming is nearly as prevalent or more so than ad-free options.
Folks should read this and understand how much of the CTV ads they are buying now are not ads on CTV. Plain and simple. Thanks for writing up.
Brian, direct viewing data shows that the vast, vast majority of streaming viewing is on ad free or ad-light. The bar that Nielsen used is that there was vieweing on an ad supported tier, and looking at the data direclty you see very little ad-heavy streaming viewing. Nielsen's Gauge supports that .... you can look at the brands that doiinate viewing and apply their ad loads.
If it only accounts for 10% of adcimpressions how much reach might it add? Perhaps there are better places to go after a few choice spots.
Guys, Nielsen did not attempt to calculate GRPs--that is ad "impreesions". It merely classified each source as either ad-free or ad-supported if it noted a certain amount of ads--or no ads ---eminating from that source.
So Brian, Dave has a point. However it's not perfectly clear how many commercial impressions are being delivered via streaming except to say that it's a lot less than the share of total viewing stats. This is because an average hour of ad-supported streaming, counting all of the major sellers, features only 5-6 minutes of commercials while the corresponding figure for linear TV is around 15 minutes.
Returning to the matter of reach attainnment,Jack, it's perfectly possible for a streaming ad buy to add significantly to a linear TV buy if you want any form of demographic balance in your audience coverage. If my estimate of a 17% share of ad GRPs for streamintg is correct that probably works out to a 35-40% share among 18-34s and a mere 8-10% among the 55+ segment. So obviously you are going to add more among the younger group than the older--but that is exactly what many advertisers are trying to do. However the buys must be made properly--via direct deals with the sellers and disperesed to maximize reach. So, here,again, I agree with Dave that many streaming buys may not be doing this. But many are. It's not a 100% problem, but well worth noting --and, when found, correcting.