• by Wayne Friedman , July 18, 2025

With its upfront TV/streaming negotiating “nearly complete,” Netflix expects “roughly double” the advertising revenue in 2025 versus the year before, according to company executives -- as part of releasing its second-quarter financial results.

Brian Wieser, media analyst of Madison & Wall, estimates this will come to around $3 billion -- roughly 7% of Netflix’s overall estimated revenue for this year, projected to be between $43.5 billion and $44.5 billion.

Against this backdrop of a strong and somewhat expected advertising result, another media analyst does not expect any material changes to the amount of ad inventory Netflix will offered to brands/advertisers.

“We don’t expect a change to ad load to be considered at least until 2027 once fill rate is addressed,” says Dan Salmon, media analyst at NewStreet Research. “Moreover, we continue to have conservative pricing assumptions for Netflix ads.”

Salmon says this is in line with what is happening with industry-wide CTV ad pricing.

While Netflix will maintain its ad supply, he expect streaming competitors to boost ad supply -- including higher ad load at Amazon Prime Video, for example. This supply and demand scenario will result in only slight industry wide pricing growth for the next several years.

For its second quarter reporting period, Netflix revenue grew 16% to $11.1 billion. It posted net income of $3.13 billion, up 46%; it was$2.15 billion in the year ago Q2 earning period.

Netflix disclosed that 95 billion hours of content was consumed during the first half of the year -- barely up 1% versus from the 94 billion hours in the first half of 2024. Viewing for TV shows was 4% higher, with movie viewing hours declining for the first time by 7%.

Wieser estimates those 95 billion hours cost $7.7 billion in amortized expenses. That means its products costs for Netflix were eight cents per content hour. This is strong financial data for Netflix when compared to what Netflix viewers/subscribers pay for that content, per hour: 22 cents.

“This reinforces the relatively high value that streaming services such as Netflix provide to consumers and helps explain why they maintain ongoing capacity to raise prices to consumers," Wieser says.

Still, engagement trends are somewhat worrisme. With an estimated 309.6 million global subscribers which, Michael Morris, media analyst for Guggenheim Securities this “implies around 1.7 daily hours viewed by members in the first quarter this year, compared to 1.8 daily hours in the second quarter 2024.

In other words, he says, the “per viewer engagement trend [is] modestly softer.” He adds that company executives are optimistic this will improve in the second quarter.