• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

Noted Wall Street analyst and media research guru Brian Wieser of Madison & Wall recently 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.

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?

This post was previously published in an earlier edition of Media Insider.