Streaming Spend Peaks, But How Much Of The Reach Is Actually New?

Streaming video ad spend has held firm over the past seven months at $582.6 million, edging past last year’s $576.1 million. However, impressions slipped from 71.4 billion to 69.5 billion even as total airings climbed. According to EMARKETER, this gap is a sign of a maturing market, and we completely agree. The early land grab, when fresh ad-supported tiers flooded platforms with impressions, has given way to a settled landscape where viewership is spread across more services and raw impression count isn’t enough to tell the whole story.

This shift plays to CTV’s strengths. As impressions get harder to scale, the advantage goes to advertisers who can prove who they actually reached. One report from Omnicom Media found that 62% of streaming subscribers see the same ad more than once in a single session, and 52% would pay more to skip the repeats. Get robust frequency management and cross-platform deduplication right, and that reality turns into a competitive edge: person-level measurement separates real incremental reach from wasted repetition. 

Our Take
Live sports used to be a place on TV where only the biggest spenders could afford to play. But the game has changed: digital live sports viewers will outnumber traditional TV viewers this year, and the tournament’s biggest moments pull tens of millions across premium streaming, not just broadcast. The question for advertisers is no longer whether they can get in, it’s what they can prove once they do. 

We watched that answer take shape during the tournament itself. MNTN advertisers who aired on premium CTV during the live matches drove more than 1.2 million site visits and close to 58,000 conversions at a blended 8.35x ROAS, and 29% of them on television for the first time. And those visits and conversions kept coming long after the final whistle, even on the days no ads ran.

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