LONDON—Pixalate, a fraud protection, privacy, and compliance analytics platform for connected TV (CTV) and mobile advertising, has released a new report highlighting some of emerging woes in the FAST channel ad market. Its data shows that in Q2 2024, FAST Apps estimated ad spend market share drops 64% across Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Samsung Smart TV.
“FAST apps rose to prominence during COVID-19 and while initially promising, relative ad spend in this space has fallen dramatically,” said Amit Shetty, vice president of product at Pixalate. “This decline possibly suggests market saturation of FAST apps and a potential shift towards non-FAST apps, which may be perceived as offering more premium inventory.”
The new data is part of the Q2 2024 Global Free Ad-Supported Television (FAST) Apps Rankings and Traffic Analysis Report for CTV. Pixalate published Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Samsung Smart TV versions of the report.
To compile these reports, Pixalate’s data science and analyst team analyzed over six billion open programmatic advertising transactions across more than 10K CTV Bundle IDs mapped to over 5K unique CTV apps in the second quarter of 2024.
The declines show declines in the relative share, not declines in the total ad spend.
Key Report Takeaways include:
- Ad Spend: 64% YoY decrease in estimated open programmatic ad spend share of voice that went to FAST apps
- 37% YoY decrease on Roku
- 43% YoY decrease on Amazon Fire TV
- 44% YoY decrease on Apple TV
- 67% YoY decrease on Samsung Smart TV
Downloads of the reports are available here.
Others have also been highlighting issues with the streaming ad market and the CTV ad market as YouTube reported slower ad growth this week.
In a note to investors, analyst Richard Greenfield at LightShed Partners wrote that the aggressive move of Amazon Prime Video into the streaming ad business is “clearly pressuring” the CTV ad market place.
“Amazon’s change has led to far more CTV inventory and has pressured industry CPMs,” Greenfield reported. “Over at NBC, Peacock CPMs were down 25% year-over-year in Q2, with total Peacock advertising up 10%, decelerating dramatically over the past year. Within Google’s Q2 results, YouTube revenue growth decelerated from 21% to 13%. Given that upwards of 50% of YouTube time spent occurs on connected TVs, it is hard not to walk away with the view that CTV competition is a problem for everyone not named Amazon.”
“Also hard not to believe that Netflix advertising is below what they had hoped (even though it is very early days) given the recent management change made along with Q2 results,” Greenfield said. “As Netflix continues to scale advertising and opens up programmatic in Q3 2024 (Xandr exclusivity has ended), the pressure on the CTV ad marketplace is likely to intensify.”
