Connected TV advertising statistics

Ad spend is the headline metric: the total amount advertisers pay for CTV inventory in a market and year. EMARKETER's forecasts put US connected TV ad spending above $26 billion a year in the mid-2020s. Spend forecasts are models, not audits — they combine company disclosures, agency data and assumptions — so always cite them as forecasts and note the publication year.

Reach describes how many households or people a campaign can touch. On CTV it depends on which apps and operating systems an advertiser can buy across. Platform-reported households, such as Roku's 90m+ in the US, define the upper bound for buying through one platform; audience-extension deals like Titan Ads' claimed 30 million+ European households describe reach assembled across partners.

Price is usually expressed as CPM — cost per thousand impressions. CTV CPMs typically sit above standard online video because the ad plays full-screen on the largest screen in the home, usually with sound and without a skip button. We do not publish a single market CPM figure because rates vary widely by app, targeting and buying route, and no independent source publishes one that holds across the market.

Frequency is the average number of times a household sees the same ad. Because CTV inventory is fragmented across many apps, the same viewer can be reached repeatedly by buys that do not share data, a problem the IAB and buyers have discussed openly in industry research.

For years the largest streaming services carried no advertising at all. The introduction of cheaper ad-supported plans by major subscription services opened premium inventory that had not existed before. Antenna's sign-up analysis shows that where an ad tier is offered, the majority of new subscribers choose it. That shift matters to advertisers because each new ad-tier subscriber adds addressable audience without any change in total viewing.

It also matters to subscription economics. Antenna's US churn reporting puts typical monthly churn across premium services at around 5%, and Deloitte's Digital Media Trends surveys find households holding four or more paid video services. Ad tiers give services a way to keep price-sensitive viewers who might otherwise cancel, which in turn keeps their impressions in the market.

Unlike linear TV, where a single currency measured audiences, CTV data is held by many parties: the TV manufacturer's operating system, the streaming app, the measurement company and the ad-tech platform. Operating systems sit closest to the screen and increasingly sell ads on their home screens and in their own free channels. That is why moves such as Titan OS winning all Philips 2026 models, and holding exclusive TiVo OS ad sales rights in Germany, France, Italy and Spain according to The Streaming Wars, are advertising stories as much as product ones.

For buyers, the practical result is that the source of a statistic often has a commercial interest in it. Platform reach claims are useful but promotional; independent measurement remains the benchmark for proving a campaign's outcome.

Proving that a CTV campaign worked is harder than proving a search ad worked, because nobody clicks on a television. Advertisers therefore rely on three approaches. Brand-lift studies survey exposed and unexposed groups to compare awareness or intent. Household-level attribution matches the households that saw an ad with later website visits or purchases, using IP addresses or identity graphs. Incrementality tests hold out a control group or region and compare outcomes. Each approach answers a different question, and each depends on data that platforms and measurement companies hold. When you read a vendor's case study, check which approach was used, how large the control group was, and whether an independent party ran the analysis. Results reported without a control group should be read as correlation, not proof.

CTV inventory reaches advertisers through several routes. Direct deals are negotiated with a streaming service or a TV platform for guaranteed placements. Programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals use ad-tech pipes but with pre-agreed terms. Open programmatic auctions sell remaining impressions in real time. Platform home-screen units — banners and sponsored tiles on the TV interface — are sold by operating-system owners such as Roku or Titan OS. Each route offers different control over where ads run, different data for targeting, and different prices, so the same campaign budget can produce very different outcomes depending on the mix.

When comparing statistics about CTV spend, check whether they include platform home-screen ads and YouTube on TV screens, as definitions vary between forecasters.

Every number on this page links to the organisation that published it: an independent research firm, an official product or pricing page, a public filing, or official documentation. We do not publish our own estimates as facts, and where a figure is reported by the company it describes, it is labelled company-reported. Prices are taken from official vendor pages and change often, so open the linked source before relying on one. If a widely repeated figure could not be traced to a primary source, we left it out. Entries are reviewed when the underlying sources publish new editions, and the update date at the top of the page shows the latest review.