The State of Streaming Monetization 2026
How are streaming content companies doing? Publishers, creators, and aggregators have traditionally made the majority of their revenue on subscriptions, so why does everyone want to talk about advertising? Ad-supported content is more affordable. Because most streaming consum-ers have maxed out their subscriptions, leaving the SVOD market saturated, advertising is more likely to be the dominant incremental revenue driver for streaming over the next several years, based on how media companies are talking about themselves and guiding investors.
Even in SVOD, the majority of growth is happening in ad tiers. More than 70% of net new subscriptions in the U.S. since 2023 has come from ad-based plans, according to Antenna’s “State of Subscriptions Report.” “Some 71% of Net Additions in the past 9 quarters came from ad plans,” Antenna reveals. “Ad-supported Net Adds grew by 7.6M YoY from 19.8M in 2023 to 27.4M in 2024.” While consumers are increasingly opting for content with ads, media companies and advertisers are taking a deep dive into data for ad-supported streaming.
A Quick Financial Snapshot
In its Q3 2025 shareholder letter, Roku reported, “Platform revenue grew 17% YoY, driven by strength in streaming services distribution and video advertising activities. We deepened integrations with third-party ad demand and measurement platforms, grew Roku-billed subscriptions, and enhanced our Home Screen and the overall Roku Experience.”
Netflix reported $45.2 billion in revenue for 2025 (an increase of 16% year over year), according to the company’s Q4 shareholder letter. Netflix’s ad revenue rose more than 2.5x to more than $1.5 billion. Q4 revenue increased 18% year over year, and the company surpassed 325 million paid memberships. For Q3 2025, Paramount reported in its shareholder letter that streaming revenue increased by 38% year over year. Subscription revenue grew 46% to $1.3 billion, driven by subscriber growth and pricing increases for Paramount+ as well as revenue from pay-per-view events. Advertising revenue increased 18%. Paramount+ subscribers topped 63 million, and global ARPU expanded 16% year over year.
At the end of Q4 2025, Disney reported 196 million Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions, an increase of 12.4 million versus Q3 fiscal 2025, and 132 million Disney+ subscribers, an increase of 3.8 million versus Q3 fiscal 2025. Disney continues to report its streaming business within the direct to consumer segment, without standalone revenue reported.
Comcast/NBC (Peacock) and Warner Bros. Discovery also do not explicitly break out Peacock or Max streaming revenue, respectively, in their primary full-year press releases, so it’s harder to get a snapshot of how each company’s premium streaming platform is contributing to the bottom line.
Circumventing Subscription Fatigue
According to Alia J. Daniels, COO and co-founder of global LGBTQ+ streaming network Revry, “Consumers are already experiencing subscription fatigue. As consolidation continues, they’re going to gravitate toward simpler, more accessible options,” she contends. “That’s where FAST and AVOD come in. The value proposition is clear: quality content without the friction of another monthly payment.”
“View times are far more extensive on AVOD than they are on FAST,” says Jonathon Barbato, co-CEO at streaming channel brand developer Best Ever Channels. “Although AVOD viewing increases exponentially when there’s a FAST channel for discovery of the content, the two together seems to be the true winning strategy.” Best Ever Channels has ad revenue through FAST channels and subscription revenue through two SVOD channels.
LGBTQ+ streaming network Revry operates on a “tribrid” model, including FAST, AVOD, and SVOD.
Addressing the Message
Now, everything is about targeting and addressable advertising. What addressable enables is that anyone who is in advertising can find a better match for who they are trying to reach, so in principle, advertisers have to do less guesswork when it comes to serving ads to the right market.
“We build ad products to get our viewer to engage with your message,” says Matt Van Houten, SVP of ad sales for DIRECTV. “We infuse data and technology to make sure that that viewer is engaged and then that they take an action.”
In essence, Van Houten adds, “We’re all selling commercial airtime. There’s about 16 minutes of commercials: 14 minutes by the content creator—typically the programmer or publisher—and then 2 minutes
by the distributor. For companies like ours and others,” the key questions are, “How do I differentiate when talking to the top Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 brands? How do I get the right ad to the right person at the right time based on either first-, second-, or third-party data attributes?”
Campaign Performance
Whether it’s traditional TV or digital, Van Houten says, today’s media and entertainment advertising ecosystem operates with a “performance-based marketing approach.” This means that publishers are paid only on performance.
“In some cases, we use AI to do sentiment analysis to provide audience segments that are more dynamic and informed,” Van Houten explains. “Sometimes, clients will come to us and say, ‘I have my own third-party data, and I just want to plug in and access your DIRECTV audience,’” he says. “When we’ve leaned into AI, it’s been much more related to improving operational efficiency, enhancing some of our client solutions. We’ve been doing AI, machine learning, and predictive modeling and having data scientists infuse under our business for a very, very long time.”
The idea here is that the company is using AI to reach more appropriate audiences. In November 2025, DIRECTV launched DIRECTV Elect, an AI-powered, next-generation digital platform for political advertisers to reach audiences on CTV. Previously, this audience was primarily on linear satellite.
DIRECTV’s new AI-powered platform for political advertisers, DIRECTV Elect
Adding to what Van Houten describes as a “big push” for CTV in political campaign advertising, he says that with DIRECTV Elect, “We can use a bunch of the voter data that’s available through these tools to help unlock deeper insights and more effectively make those connections. And so there’s some intelligence there that can improve the reach and credibility of televisions going across both TV and streaming. When we’ve combined those and we’ve used AI for audience intelligence, it’s made a big difference.”
Van Houten describes large language model-driven voter sentiment insights as a “secret sauce” DIRECTV is injecting into political spaces. These AI models incorporate “responses, news, social media, donation patterns, voting behaviors, and political campaigns.” This enables campaigns to dig deeper than geography and party affiliation when it comes to information about voters. “We all know we’re more complex than just those two things,” Van Houten says.
Why IP Is Not Enough
Better political advertising is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to addressability and its advantages over the approaches that preceded it. First, there was buying based on programming (the viewer you wanted to capture watched a certain show on linear), then IP and cookies (user data gathered by web browsers to identify and serve ads to an individual or household).
Addressability represents a significant step forward in performance-based advertising, Van Houten contends. “You need to understand deterministic relationships and value, and you understand how data and segments can be applied, and you need to be able to measure it on the back end and then provide attribution on the funnel for outcomes and brand awareness. Did you take an action? Did you purchase a SKU?”
That’s the kind of data that addressable advertising can provide, says Van Houten. “Agencies and buyers are asking about it more than ever. They’re increasing their budgets every year.”
Van Houten also serves as board chair for Go Addressable, a trade organization founded (according to its website) by DIRECTV Advertising, AMC Networks, Comcast Advertising, DISH Media, and Spectrum Reach “to help maximize the scale, impact, and value of TV as a marketing platform.”
“When I started with Go Addressable 4 or 5 years ago, we had 100 people come check us out,” Van Houten recalls. Since then, the number has grown to 700. This includes “people at all of the top brands and agencies, because just the idea of data and technology being infused into advertising … continues to be powerful,” he says.
According to Go Addressable research, two-thirds of advertisers who are not using addressable TV plan to start in 2026. More than two in five advertisers plan to increase spending on addressable TV in 2026. “TV and cable companies are now looking to lean into digital transformations,” Van Houten says. “My customers are in so many different places now. They’re on YouTube, watching on mobile devices and a lot of social. How do you stitch together all of that for programmers?”
Go Addressable, a trade organization for addressable advertising
The Data Double Blind
If you’re a brand or an advertiser, is there a way to get a comprehensive media plan without having AI? Audience building used to rely on a lot of intuition and manual rules. With companies that are implementing AI, a marketer can now describe the audience they want in natural language and receive a proposal on precise segments and even lookalike audiences based on information gleaned from first-, second-, and third-party data. These segments are tied to real conversion and engagement signals, so they should get better over time.
The LiveRamp marketplace is an information clearinghouse that has prospered as a digital environment to enable deep levels of matching against data. There, IP owners and brands can see audience overlap, sales impact, and affinities without exposing raw data. This privacy-safe collaboration allows two parties to connect their data for targeting, measurement, or audience insights while maintaining privacy over proprietary data. They resolve all of the disparate data (including CTV IDs, cookies, IP addresses, MAIDs, and IDFAs) tied to an identity to the RampID identifier without sharing these emails to the streaming service.
“What we have done most recently,” says Adam Paul, LiveRamp’s executive director of media alliances, “is put AI-driven functions on top of that marketplace to make it easier for brands to identify the right audiences that they’d want to use to achieve their business objectives and their audience targeting objectives, whatever their KPI outcomes are. The AI overlay helps them figure out the right audience to deliver on their campaign goals.”
The typical request, Paul explains, goes like this: “‘Help me understand, as a buyer or as a planner, which inventory, which placements, which content, which contextual signals are going to deliver on the campaign goals.’ What the AI functions have done is to take the qualitative and business outcomes that a brand is looking to achieve and surface, from end-to-end, the right audience data marketplace all the way through the media plan to figure out how to map back to the brief.”
What will be interesting to watch going forward is how tuned in AI is to younger viewers who have opted out of some of the more traditional media environments. According to InStreamly, 62% of Gen Z viewers have completely ditched traditional TV in favor of livestreaming platforms.
Paul says the real value proposition of this approach is its “predictive aspect,” which helps advertisers identify what targets “are likely to convert prior to the campaign.” The key element of this analysis is the ability to say, “OK, this campaign happened to drive the most outcomes in the past. Let me optimize toward that publisher in the future.” AI, he notes, “is helping us get ahead of that, so you don’t have to do as much iterative work—let’s run a campaign, predict, evaluate, run another campaign, optimize, and so on and so forth.” Paul describes LiveRamp’s CrossMedia Intelligence measurement solution as “more of a post-campaign tool than it is a planning tool. It’s looking across premium publishers to enable brand measurement across the entirety of their spend, walled gardens, premium, CTV, etc.”
LiveRamp’s Cross-Media Intelligence measurement solution
This is half the nirvana everyone has hoped for. Couple it with the same level of measurement on the planning tool, and we would be much closer to the potential for deeper insights that digital has always offered over linear.
CrossMedia Intelligence, Paul goes on to say, “brings all of those publisher datasets into our clean room. It gives [publishers] more control over what they share and to whom and how it’s being used, as well as comfort and confidence in the queries that are being run and the insights that are being delivered across those combined datasets.”
Enlarging the Pie
Another trend Paul identifies is that leagues and teams in the sports world have begun “to act a little bit more like media companies. They have their own streaming assets, and they’re trying to fulfill more targeted and measurable sponsorship activations,” he says.
Some leagues have invested heavily in their owned-and-operated apps, Paul shares, and “you’re starting to see more and more that they’re carving out distribution rights packages differently with different partners. Even MLB has struck a deal with Disney and ESPN. The NFL also struck a deal with ESPN. You’re starting to see ESPN work and monetize some of those assets, but ultimately, you’re seeing a hybrid. The NFL has Sunday Ticket on YouTube. You’re seeing both testing of different models and also breaking down the rights packages into smaller units so that they could sell a bundle to different distribution partners.”
Where the Compass Points
LiveRamp also partners with Disney to enable tools such as Disney Compass, which allows brands to activate with Disney’s data offerings across the entire campaign lifecycle, from initial planning and buying to final measurement, according to Paul.
“Every year, we are operating out of hundreds of individual clean rooms, delivering custom audiences on demand across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN,” says Dana McGraw, SVP of data and measurement science for Disney Entertainment and ESPN. “We’re interoperable with virtually every DSP. Both our identity capabilities and our clean room are foundational to what we presented on stage last year when we introduced Disney Compass.”
Building on this vast amount of data is the ability to query the data. “We are building AI-powered summaries that highlight key learnings and surface new opportunities,” McGraw explains. “Disney’s AI chatbot will become your strategic planning and measurement assistant, helping you quickly leverage the most valuable insights to inform your campaign decisions.” Buyers will be able to ask Compass who is being reached, where they’re showing up across Disney, and what is driving outcomes. Advertisers will also see their campaign results alongside category benchmarks and real-world industry norms in one consolidated view.
Owning the Data
Streaming services that are distributed in environments other than their owned-and-operated platform do not have the level of access to audience data that companies like Disney or DIRECTV have. Every independent service representative I’ve ever spoken with says they never get compressive data. If contextual advertising is critical to competing on CPMs, are we widening the gap between the data haves and have-nots?
“Advertising will continue to be our primary form of monetization,” says Revry’s Daniels. Revry has its own ad exchange, PrismRiot, and it sells advertising on its owned-and-operated properties. For this inventory, it gets as many data signals as it wants, plus the premium CPMs the market will support. That changes when it works with distributors.
“We get very little data from the platforms, especially Amazon,” says Best Ever Channels’ Barbato. “Most of our data comes from Wurl regarding our FAST channel delivery or AVOD viewing spreadsheets.”
View From Afar
Sometimes, when I am doing something online—not necessarily streaming, but reading, being on social, or listening to music—I feel like advertisers know a bit too much about me. This feeling will only intensify in the years to come, as it’s now very clear that the world of advertising will become more and more targeted. For all it will cost consumers in terms of privacy, it should also bring a much-improved level of satisfaction to them in terms of the relevance of ads they see.
The biggest uphill battle some companies will face is not being too creepy about using all of this data. There is a fine line between improving the ad experience and sharing too much about the viewer. Here’s hoping the industry will walk that line carefully.
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