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.

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

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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.

Joshua Chasin from KnotSimpler, August 13, 2025 at 3:28 p.m.

There aee a couple of other dynamics at play.

We know that tonnage of viewing is quickly shifting to streaming; and that impressions per minute viewed on streaming are way lower than on linear. But at the same time, the cohort of viewers who do most of their viewing via streaming are incredibly difficut to reach sufficiently. There aren't enough available impressions to go around to reach that cohort. And dumping more money into linear TV isn't going to solve that porblem, becsuse that's not where they are.

But here's the crazy thing, and I do not have data to dupport this, but I'll submit that all of us who watch a lot of ad-supported streaming content know this is true.

If you binge a show on an ad-supported streaming service, you're going to see the same as, if you watch long enough, like 15 times. Every time my wife and I binge a show with ads, she makes fun of me. "If you people are so smart, why did we see that Neil Degrasse Tyson TikTok STEM ad 14 times tonight?" And I don't know what to tell her.

I'd love to understand this. Too many of us are primarily available only via streaming, there's nowhere enough impressions to meet the needs of all the advertisers who want to reach us-- but we see the same ads over and over.

One colleague with HoldCo and network experience told me recently that he thought this is the dark underbelly of advanced targets-- that when targets get thin enough, each of us sees only the ads for the tiny target we belong to (say, lefthanded diabetic cat owners.) Dave, what do we need to do to fix this?

Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, August 13, 2025 at 4:10 p.m.

Josh, many people who watch streaming content also watch linear TV. Also heavy vieewers once they add streaming to their sources of content usually remain heavy viewers--so there is a huge pile up of ad impressions among streaming's top quintile--just like in linear.

Howewver, you are correct, that about 25-30%--mostly younger--consumers watch only streaming content while a smaller--mostly older group does the same for linear.

Finally, it's not a mad rush to streaming, it's a slow, steady movement in that direction. And the composition of the streaming audience is changing. The median age of adult streamers--per minute viewers-- is now about 44-45 years and rising. Sure, that's younger than linear--median age about 60 years---but the two platforms are going to look more and more alike as ad-supported streaming continues to grow and ad loads push upward.

Jack Wakshlag from Media Strategy, Research & Analytics replied, August 13, 2025 at 5:43 p.m.

Ad frequency capping should not be challenging in CTV in situations you describe so well -- same show, same ad 15x. I dont get it except to say that if you overpromise huge impressions, and need to deliver, you do those for the advertiser you like the best (who pays you the highest cost per impression). Lower cost advertisers get few impressions at all, and the higher priced ones get frequency.

Am guessing that younger viewers spend more of their time on non ad supported sources, making it even harder.

A growing share of younger viewing going to non ad supported streaming (paid for by their parents?), lower ad loads, makes for low supply and high deman for whats left.

Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, August 13, 2025 at 7:04 p.m.

Jack, do you think that a linear TV seller could get away with bunching up a brand's commercials in the same telecast--and even in the same ad break? Answer: never. The soluttion is to put ad separation in the contract , then monitor the placements--the commercoals can all be identified.and if they--or their computers--- put the same commercial in the sme episode more than once--don't pay them for the extra bonus "impresions". Start policing your buys and punish those who don't abide by their contracted deals and you'll get some action --fast. Money talks.