Streaming is officially an advertising business. According to Antenna, nearly half (48%) of all premium subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) accounts in the US were ad-supported in Q1 2026, and 59% of new subscriptions in the quarter were for ad tiers. US ad-supported Premium SVOD subscriptions, meanwhile, hit 110 million by the same quarter, up from 53 million two years prior.
These shifts are pulling dollars into streaming. CTV upfront spend surpassed linear for the first time this year. Global CTV ad revenues are projected to nearly double, from $44 billion in 2025 to $81 billion by 2030.
And yet the industry continues to value audiences using metrics built for a bygone era. Subscriber counts, monthly active users (MAUs) and platform reach remain useful indicators of business health. They are poor indicators of advertising opportunity or campaign-ready inventory. They tell us who has signed up but not necessarily who is actively watching and reachable.
Audience curation is increasingly moving to the sell side, where OEMs, SSPs and publishers are using deterministic viewing data and real-time signals to get a direct view of who is watching at the glass level.
With audience intelligence moving closer to the point of supply, the question marketers should be asking their media partners is no longer, “How big is your audience?” Instead, they should ask: “How much of your audience is actually showing up?” Viewer loyalty is to the show, not the app. Once a season ends, audiences move on.
While this dynamic is less pronounced in FAST, where viewers can freely move between channels and access a broad range of content without a paid subscription, it can be a major churn issue for subscription-based apps, where viewers have a financial incentive to cancel when they’re no longer watching.
That shift is giving rise to a new measure of value: audience availability.
In a market where inventory is increasingly valued impression by impression, knowing who is available to reach matters more than knowing who subscribed and potentially ghosted.
The audience availability gap
In digital advertising, there is a growing risk of conflating audience size with audience availability. There are now improved ways to think about metrics:
- Audience size is potential: the number of consumers with access to a service. Metrics like MAUs and subscriber numbers signal platform scale but don’t necessarily equate to advertising opportunity.
- Ghost audiences are inactive subscribers. These are consumers who remain subscribed but aren’t actively watching during meaningful three-to-four-month campaign windows. They count toward platform metrics but generate little or no actionable advertising supply.
- Audience availability is audience presence: consumers actively watching while a campaign is running. This is the audience advertisers should be planning against.
- Audience addressability is transactable inventory. This is the subset of available viewers who can actually receive advertising. This is the audience buyers can ultimately bid on and reach.
The closer buying moves to the impression, the more costly it becomes to confuse these audiences. Just because a platform’s audience is large doesn’t mean it’s available. And even if it’s available, it isn’t always addressable.
The delta between the audience a platform reports on and the audience an advertiser can actually reach is the key gap to close.
Consider new viewers who download an app to stream NFL games during the regular season. Samsung Ads recently found that two of every three of these new viewers had “ghosted” the streaming service after the NFL season ended – nearly twice the churn rate of existing users.
These ghost audiences remain part of a platform’s reported audience, yet contribute little to campaign-ready inventory. The result is a widening disconnect between reported audience size and the transactable supply advertisers are actually bidding on.
The next competitive advantage: smarter supply
The industry’s next evolution isn’t happening on the demand side – it’s happening closer to the supply. As selling moves closer to the glass, OEMs and SSPs are evolving from distribution partners into intelligence partners, enriching inventory with real-time viewing signals that help determine the value of every impression before it reaches the auction.
In that environment, competitive advantage will no longer come from reporting the largest audience. It will come from identifying the best available audience at the exact moment an impression becomes available.
The next currency in streaming will be the strongest combination of reach and availability.
“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
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