Commentary

Wieser Is Right: CTV Is Tiny Fraction Of Ads Viewed On TV

by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, August 7, 2025

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.

8 comments about "Wieser Is Right: CTV Is Tiny Fraction Of Ads Viewed On TV".

Check to receive email when comments are posted.

Jack Wakshlag from Media Strategy, Research & Analytics, August 7, 2025 at 4:27 p.m.
Why people move their ad dollars to places that cost way more remains a mystery. Lemmings? More accountability? Not really.
Reply

Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, August 8, 2025 at 6:55 a.m.

It just happened again, Jack, in the current upfront sale--but the CTV CPMs are coming down at the same time. They are now much more competitive to linear TV.

Curtis Smith from Klick Health, August 8, 2025 at 3:36 p.m.

I'm right on board with the overall takeaways and have been preaching this for a while. But the other cut - and conundrum of where we are today - is that the share of viewing on linear is reaching a smaller and smaller mostly older audience who are still propping up that linear viewing. I'd be curious to see these same statistics against an 18-49 audience. It will still be a large discrepancy but I would bet the gap would be closed. Cable barely bothers to truly program their networks anymore.

Jack Wakshlag from Media Strategy, Research & Analytics replied, August 11, 2025 at 2:55 p.m.

There's a huge price gap and has been for at least a decade, if it's coming down, there's still plenty of room -- and my guess is camps agains 18-49 are also far higher and need to come down -- especially given the frequency problems we all know too well.

Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, August 11, 2025 at 6:30 p.m.

Jack, linear TV's 18-49 and 25-54 audience comps are a shadow of what they were before streaming. Then about 40-45% of their viewers came from these groups--sometimes more. Now, it's more like 10-15%. As for streaming--I'm referring hto the major sellers. the broadcast network owned services, plus Roku, Netflix, Amazon, etc.--- their CPMs are now lower than the broadcast networks for prime time but higher than what most cable channels are charging. The buyers have made that happen. The mile high CTV "honeymoon" period is over.

Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, August 11, 2025 at 6:48 p.m.

Regarding the CTV ad "inventory" problem, Brian is right tht it's a small part of the total--about 20%,currently, and that claims that Amazon is "flooding the market with CTV GRPs , thus forcing CPMs dows, is vastly overblown.

However if you look at the demos, you will find that most of linear TV's advantage is generated by old folk's viewing and this has no bearing when the buyers are using 18-49 or 25-54 as their audience guarantee "currency". Streaming's share of available GRPs among the younger age roups is considerably higher than its overall average and advertisers seeking a more balanced audience by age are using CTV to move in that direction.

Dave Morgan from Simulmedia replied, August 12, 2025 at 2:49 a.m.

Curtis, there is no question that TV viewing among younger demos is much, much lower than it used to be. Unfortunately for marketers, they haven't transitioned efficiently to ad-supported streaming services at anything like the scale that they were available on national TV before. Their viewing is very fragmented and linear TV is still one of the more efficient media to reach them, particularly in local broadcast, where news, sports and diginets (extra digital channels tied to local station licenses) audiences have held up much better than their national counterparts over the past five years.

Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, August 12, 2025 at 6:58 a.m.

Dave, while you can still reach about half of the 18-34s and about two-thirds of the 35-49s with linear TV buys if you keep at it for many months, but you would have to spand a lot of money to do so and you would be piling up older GRPs at a phenomenal rate. Local news is cetainly not the way to targer 18-49s in linear and if you go heavily into sports the median age of your audience isbout 53-54 years and you get mostly males at a very high CPM.

As you say, advertisers have only just begun to get serious about streaming, but if they want a more balanced mix of media weight as well as reach among most age groups a combination of linear and streaming seems almost mandated these days.