Ad-Supported TV Is Winning. Here’s What That Means for All of Us.
I want to start with a number that should make everyone in this business smile: Ad-supported TV now makes up nearly 73% of all TV viewing.
That’s not my spin on it — that’s from Nielsen’s Ad Supported Gauge, which tracks how America is spending its time with ad-supported television. And for anyone working in FAST, CTV, or streaming TV, it confirms something we have been seeing for a while: Free, ad-supported viewing is not a side story anymore.
Let that sink in for a second. For years, the prevailing wisdom was that everybody would eventually pay their way out of commercials and ad-supported TV would fade into the background. Instead, FAST and other ad-supported streaming environments are helping prove the opposite.
Almost three out of every four hours we spend watching TV are happening in ad-supported environments, and Nielsen describes that share as holding steady.
This isn’t a fluke quarter. It’s the shape of the market.
Sports Keeps Everyone Glued to the Couch
If you want to know why ad-supported viewing is so sticky, follow the games.
Sports remains one of the biggest forces keeping audiences locked into ad-supported TV. In Q1, streaming’s record share of ad-supported viewing was helped by major live events like the Super Bowl, Olympics coverage on Peacock, and NFL playoff games on Amazon.
Then cable rode the March Madness wave right into April and was the only viewing category to gain share that month, landing at its biggest slice of TV in six months.
The NCAA Basketball Tournament, the start of the NBA Playoffs pulled the largest cable audience of the month, and live sports kept anchoring schedules across the board.
Here’s the reality: Nobody turns off the championship game because there’s a commercial break. The audience shows up in huge numbers, fully comfortable with ads as the price for access to the stuff they care about most.
It’s Not Just Sports
Sports may get a lot of attention, but it’s not the whole story.
The latest Nielsen data also shows the continued strength of premium drama across TV and streaming. In April, TV dramas were the most-watched genre, and The Pitt led streaming titles with 4.5 billion viewing minutes on HBO Max.
This fact reminds us that ad-supported TV is not just about one kind of viewing behavior. People are watching sports, news, dramas, entertainment, lifestyle programming, and more across the big screen.
In other words, the TV experience is alive and well. It has just spread across more services, more platforms, and more ways to watch.
Streaming Is Where the Growth Is
Now layer in the most important trend: Inside the ad-supported world, streaming is the growth engine. Ad-supported streaming hit a record-high 46.6% share of ad-supported TV viewing in Q1, and streaming overall held a commanding 47.6% of all TV viewing in April.
So ad-supported TV is still the majority of television, and streaming is taking a larger and larger share of that ad-supported market. The free model is thriving on its own merits. Tubi grew 3% in April to a platform high of 2.3% share of all television.
FAST is not a backup plan. It is now one of the main ways people watch TV.
Here’s Where OrkaTV Comes In
This is the market we built OrkaTV for.
We run the leading advertising marketplace 100 percent dedicated to Streaming TV, monetizing thousands of FAST channels and connecting them directly to advertisers, from the biggest brands to the brand-new.
Every trend in these Nielsen reports points to more eyeballs on exactly the kind of premium, ad-supported, full-screen TV content we built our marketplace to power.
For advertisers, this is the mainstream American audience you have been trying to reach, at scale.
For channel partners, it is a smarter, more direct path to monetizing your content.
For everyone who has been wondering whether TV is still where attention lives, the answer is yes. It’s just streaming, and now is the time to take advantage of it.
If you want to talk about what that means for your brand or your channels, get in touch with us. We’d love to show you how we can help you achieve your goals in the streaming TV era.