Beyond the Top 300: CTV’s Next Phase Calls for Discoverability
Rumors of Meta moving into connected TV (CTV) are picking up. (And of course it’s not just Meta. Sometimes it seems like everyone and their mother is building for SMB advertisers.) The direction of travel is clear: More demand is coming, from more places, in more fragmented ways. The CTV market is expanding beneath our feet.
For the past few years, CTV has largely been defined by a relatively closed loop: a few hundred major advertisers transacting with a small group of scaled streaming platforms. Big budgets, direct relationships, and upfront-style deals dominated the landscape. This made sense, as most of the early CTV market was linear extensions. But like many models, that one worked until it needed to be bigger.
Now we’re seeing the beginning of a structural expansion. The market is moving beyond a world defined by the Top 300 advertisers buying from the Top 10 platforms. Automated and programmatic pipes are opening. Biddable infrastructure is maturing. And critically, a much broader base of advertisers is starting to show up.
That includes performance marketers, mid-market brands, and long-tail advertisers, few of whom are looking for high-touch sales cycles. They’re logging into their DSP or platform partner, setting budgets and goals, and looking to buy CTV the same way they buy everything else: quickly, flexibly, and based on signals they can understand. The difference with CTV is there is a much greater value placed on the content than in the web/mobile app sector.
This is where the friction begins. On the publisher side, the dominant monetization model is still rooted in direct sales. For years, CTV publishers have focused on translating linear relationships into streaming, via upfronts, custom packages, and sales-led deals. That approach has been effective, but it has a ceiling. It also cuts the other way: not all advertisers and agencies have the means to do big upfront commitments.
In recent publisher conversations, the pattern is consistent. Most can actively service somewhere between 300 and 400 advertisers. Beyond that, things break down.
So what happens when 10,000 or 20,000 advertisers enter the market?
This is where the opportunity is starting to expand.
Suppliers are building out programmatic teams and offerings. Others are experimenting with DSP integrations or managed service layers. Buyers are trying to find easier and more operationally efficient ways to buy across hundreds if not thousands of advertisers and campaigns. But the underlying mechanics are still tied to operationally heavy constructs, primarily deal IDs and curated packages. And those simply don’t scale to thousands of buyers. As one operator put it bluntly: “You can’t create 10,000 deals for 10,000 advertisers. Nor is that what my buyer clients want.”
This is the tension shaping the next phase of CTV. It’s not just about adding more demand. It’s also about enabling that demand to find and transact on supply without friction.
In practice, that means moving beyond a binary model of direct vs. programmatic in order to embrace a more complete monetization framework. No one is saying ‘decrease direct premium sales.’ This is TV, after all; the most premium ad environments available. But as biddable demand continues to grow, capturing the next wave of spend won’t be determined by supply alone. It will hinge on discoverability: whether buyers can find content, publishers can signal it, and platforms can aggregate it through the right partners.
Can buyers, sitting inside a DSP, identify relevant content without a pre-negotiated deal? Can they search for “sports talk,” “DIY programming,” or “action movies” and buy against them with confidence?
Can smaller advertisers, those without deep agency layers or relationships, access premium CTV inventory and program content with ease?
At the moment, the answer tends to be “no,” thanks largely to inadequate signals.
Historically, digital advertising has leaned heavily on audience targeting. But CTV behaves differently. Content carries intrinsic value. Context and programming matters more. And buyers increasingly want to understand not just who they’re reaching, but how to best reach them on CTV content they know will carry high attention.
That will require a change in the way supply is structured and exposed at the platform levels.
Instead of packaging inventory into opaque deals, publishers need to think about how their content is indexed, described, and made accessible at the program level. It’s about turning content into something that can be discovered, filtered, and activated without manual intervention. Doing so signals to the entire market that buyers can find what they want easily in the systems they already use.
Publishers’ supply is already negotiable for humans. Now it needs to become legible to machines.
This is where the broader market dynamics come into focus.
If Meta and others enter CTV, they’ll bring a lot more than a handful of large brand advertisers with them. They’ll bring an ecosystem: thousands of businesses accustomed to self-serve buying, performance measurement, and real-time optimization.
That demand doesn’t wait for upfronts, doesn’t operate on quarterly negotiations, and won’t tolerate friction that feels like legacy TV. It will go where it can transact. A CTV publisher need only compare the number of advertisers it’s currently seeing to the number of advertisers a platform like Meta or Google have. That is the universe the right signals can start to bring in.
Because in a world where demand scales faster than sales teams, discoverability becomes the new distribution.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Peer39. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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