Industry analysis puts working media at roughly 45 to 55 cents of every CTV dollar — the rest disappears into platform and intermediary fees before a single household sees your ad. Nobody selling connected TV advertising opens with that. We would rather you knew it before you spend.
CTV advertising is the practice of buying video ads that play inside streaming content on internet-connected televisions — smart TVs, streaming sticks, game consoles and set-top boxes. Unlike traditional television, CTV ads are bought programmatically through a connected TV advertising platform and targeted at the household level using data such as location, demographics, interests and prior website visits, and CTV ads are measurable in ways broadcast never has been.
The plain version: CTV ads are television commercials that only show to the households you chose, on the big screen, bought the way you would buy a display ad rather than the way you would buy a broadcast schedule.
| Term | What it actually means |
|---|---|
| CTV | Connected TV. Defined by the device — an internet-connected television set. A smart TV, Roku, Fire Stick, Apple TV, Xbox or PlayStation. |
| OTT | Over-the-top. Defined by the delivery — content sent over the internet rather than cable or broadcast. OTT content watched on a phone is OTT but not CTV. |
| Linear TV | Traditional scheduled broadcast and cable. Everyone in the transmission area sees the same ad at the same time. Not addressable. |
| FAST | Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV. Channels like Tubi and Pluto that are free to viewers and entirely ad-funded, generally the cheapest CTV inventory available. |
| AVOD | Ad-supported video on demand. The ad tiers of subscription services, where you pay less and watch commercials. |
The distinction that matters commercially is addressable versus not. Linear television sells you an audience estimate for a time slot. CTV sells you specific households. If you serve a fifteen-mile radius, linear makes you pay for an entire metropolitan area and CTV does not — which is the whole reason connected TV advertising became available to businesses that could never afford television before.
CTV is bought on CPM — cost per thousand impressions — rather than cost per click, because there is usually nothing to click. Published 2026 analysis puts the blended average around $26 CPM, with most campaigns landing between $25 and $35 and the full market spanning roughly $15 to $45.
| Inventory tier | What you are buying | CTV ads CPM |
|---|---|---|
| FAST channels | Free ad-supported services such as Tubi and Pluto. Real, engaged audiences at the lowest available cost. | $15–$25 |
| Standard AVOD | The ad tiers of mainstream streaming services, bought programmatically. | $20–$40 |
| Premium direct | Named services bought directly, live sports and top-tier programming. | $35–$65 |
| Local geo-targeted | City, DMA, ZIP or radius targeting. Expect a premium of roughly 20 to 40% over broad buys. | +20–40% |
| Linear broadcast / cable | Traditional TV. Cheaper per thousand, but sold in packages most small advertisers cannot enter. | $10–$15 |
Ranges compiled from 2026 reporting including Adwave's quarterly CPM analysis, Simulmedia platform data and Keynes Digital. These are directional market figures rather than rate cards — your actual price depends on targeting, inventory, seasonality and how you buy.
Supply grew faster than demand. Amazon switched Prime Video to an ad-supported default, Netflix and Disney+ launched and expanded ad tiers, and free streaming services added enormous additional inventory. Reporting suggests that flood pushed CTV CPMs down by roughly 10 to 30% through 2025, and analysts broadly expect 2026 to stabilise with standard inventory settling around $20 to $25 while genuinely premium and tightly targeted placements hold $40 to $60.
For a mid-sized advertiser this is the most favorable window connected TV has had. Television used to be a channel you graduated into after you were already large. It is now a channel you can test with a few thousand dollars, and the price of entry keeps falling.
Between your budget and a household watching your ad sit several companies, each taking a percentage. A demand-side platform or CTV advertising platform buys on your behalf. A supply-side platform sells the inventory. Data providers charge for the targeting segments. Verification vendors charge to confirm the ad ran. Sometimes an agency takes a margin as well.
Published analysis of the CTV supply chain suggests only around 45 to 55% of an advertiser's dollar arrives at the publisher as working media. That is not a scandal and it is not unique to CTV — every programmatic channel has a fee stack. What is objectionable is how rarely a buyer is shown it.
Fee splits shown are mid-points of publicly reported ranges and vary considerably by how you buy. A managed service through a single self-serve platform carries different economics from a DSP buy layered with third-party data. The point is not the exact figures — it is that you should be able to ask any CTV advertising agency for this breakdown and get a straight answer.
We show you the stack. Before anything runs you see the estimated working media percentage for the way we propose to buy, and where every other cent is going. No two connected TV advertising platform routes to the same inventory cost the same, so where a cheaper one exists we take it, and where a fee genuinely buys something — better targeting data, real verification — we say what it buys and let you decide.
That transparency is also why we are comfortable running programmatic display and CTV alongside paid search: when you can see the true cost of each channel, comparing them stops being guesswork.
Television is not bought on clicks, so the planning question is different. You are asking: how many separate households will see this, and how many times will each one see it? Get that second number wrong and the campaign is wasted regardless of how good the creative is.
The rule of thumb that has survived decades of media research is that a message needs roughly three or more exposures before it registers and is recalled. Spread a small budget across too large an audience and you buy one impression each for a great many people, none of whom remember it a week later. That is the most common and most expensive mistake in television advertising, and CTV makes it easier to commit rather than harder.
A planning model, not a delivery guarantee. It assumes an average of three impressions per reached household, which is a common planning convention, and applies your working media share before calculating what the budget buys. Actual reach depends on inventory availability, frequency caps, audience density in your area and how tightly you target.
Narrow your audience and the same budget produces higher frequency against fewer households — usually the right call for a local business. Widen it and you buy reach you cannot afford to repeat to. The instinct to target as broadly as possible is almost always wrong on television, and it is the correction we make most often on accounts we inherit.
A broadcast spot reaches everyone in the transmission area, and you pay for all of them. Connected TV lets you decide which households the ad is delivered to, which is what turns television from a brand-awareness luxury into something a local service business can justify.
DMA, city, ZIP code or a radius around your location. A fifteen-mile service area no longer means paying to reach an entire metro.
Household income, age, presence of children, home ownership, life stage. Applied at the household rather than the individual level.
In-market signals, purchase intent and interest segments drawn from third-party data providers.
Households that already visited your website, served an ad on the television in that home. Consistently the strongest performing CTV audience.
Your own customer list, matched to households, for winback campaigns or to exclude existing customers from prospecting.
Genre, content category and daypart, for when audience data is thin or restricted in your category.
The highest-performing structure we run is usually the simplest: a tight geographic layer, one behavioral or demographic layer, and a retargeting audience running alongside it at a higher frequency cap. Stacking six targeting layers narrows the pool until there is not enough inventory to deliver, and then the platform quietly spends the budget somewhere else.
Nobody clicks a television. That single fact is why so many performance marketers dismiss CTV, and why so many CTV campaigns get measured badly — either judged on last-click attribution they will always lose, or on nothing at all.
| Metric | What it tells you | Benchmark |
|---|---|---|
| Video completion rate | What share of viewers watched the whole ad. CTV's structural advantage: the ad is usually unskippable on a screen nobody is scrolling past. | 90%+ |
| Cost per completed view | The honest unit of CTV pricing. Because completion is so high, CPCV and CPM track closely. | $2–$4 |
| Viewability | Whether the ad was genuinely on screen. CTV substantially outperforms display here. | ~96% |
| Site visit lift | Households exposed to the ad that subsequently visited your site, versus a matched unexposed group. | Incremental |
| Branded search lift | Increase in people searching your name during the flight. Often the clearest signal television is working. | Directional |
Completion, CPCV and viewability benchmarks compiled from 2026 industry reporting including Adwave and Digital Applied. For comparison, combined desktop and mobile video completion is reported nearer 62%.
The measurement that actually settles the argument is incrementality — holding out a comparable group of households and comparing outcomes. It costs a little reach to run and it is the only way to answer whether television produced customers you would not otherwise have had. We will build it into any campaign large enough to support one, and we will tell you honestly when yours is not.
One practical warning: CTV drives a great deal of direct and branded-search traffic that last-click reporting will hand to another channel. If you judge connected TV on last-click alone it will always look worse than it is, and your Google Ads brand campaign will look better than it is.
This is the practical barrier that stops most businesses, and it is smaller than it used to be. Every CTV advertising platform we buy through takes 15 or 30 second spots in standard broadcast quality. A repurposed social video shot vertically will not run, and a slideshow of stock images with music over it will run but should not.
The screen is large, the viewer is usually sitting down and not scrolling, and the ad is playing in the middle of content they chose. That is a more forgiving environment than a social feed and a less forgiving one in a different way: bad production looks considerably worse at 55 inches than it does at five. We produce spots for CTV as part of video production, and it is worth budgeting for properly rather than treating creative as an afterthought to the media buy.
| Good fit | Poor fit | |
|---|---|---|
| Budget | Enough to reach a defined audience three or more times | A few hundred dollars spread across a whole metro |
| Audience | Definable by geography, demographics or prior behavior | Extremely narrow niche with thin household data |
| Sales cycle | Considered purchases where trust and familiarity matter | Pure impulse where search already captures the demand |
| Creative | A real spot exists or the budget covers producing one | Nothing to run and no budget to make anything |
| Measurement | Willing to judge on lift and incrementality | Only last-click ROAS will be accepted |
If you fall on the right-hand side of most of those rows, we will say so. Selling somebody a television campaign they cannot measure or afford to repeat is how this channel got its reputation, and it is a short-term way to run an agency.
Tell us your budget and service area. We come back with the reach and frequency it genuinely buys, the fee stack, and whether we think it is the right channel for you.
Get my media planCTV suits considered purchases and defined geographies. It suits impulse buys and undefinable audiences considerably less.
High case value carries the CPM easily. Familiarity matters enormously at the moment of need.
🏥HealthcareTrust-led and geographically bounded. Check category targeting restrictions first.
🏠Real EstateHousehold targeting maps almost perfectly onto how the business actually works.
🦷DentalRadius targeting plus a strong new-patient offer. Works where the practice has capacity.
🛒EcommerceNeeds enough margin to absorb the CPM and patience for non-last-click measurement.
🏢B2BViable for large deal sizes and named-account targeting. Rarely for low-ticket B2B.
💻SaaSBrand-building for category leaders. Difficult to justify pre-product-market-fit.
🍽RestaurantsTight radius, strong offer, and only where margin supports it. Multi-location works best.
CTV advertising means buying video ads that play inside streaming content on internet-connected televisions, including smart TVs, Roku, Fire Stick, Apple TV and game consoles. Unlike traditional television, connected TV ads are bought programmatically and delivered to specific households selected by location, demographics, interests or prior website visits. That addressability is the whole difference: a broadcast spot reaches everyone in the transmission area and you pay for all of them, whereas CTV lets a business serving a fifteen-mile radius pay only to reach households inside it.
CTV is priced on CPM, meaning cost per thousand impressions. Published 2026 analysis puts the blended average near $26, with most campaigns between $25 and $35 and the market spanning roughly $15 to $45. Free ad-supported services sit at the lower end around $15 to $25, standard streaming ad tiers around $20 to $40, and premium direct buys including live sports reaching $35 to $65. Tight local geo-targeting typically adds a 20 to 40% premium. These are directional market figures rather than rate cards.
Platform minimums vary widely, but the more useful question is not the minimum you are allowed to spend, it is the minimum that produces an effect. A message generally needs three or more exposures before it registers, so the real floor is whatever buys three impressions against a household audience small enough to afford repeating to. A tightly targeted local campaign can work on a few thousand dollars a month. The same budget spread across an entire metro buys one impression each for a great many people and is wasted. The reach and frequency planner on this page shows where your budget lands.
Because several companies sit between your budget and the household. A demand-side platform buys on your behalf, a supply-side platform sells the inventory, data providers charge for targeting segments, verification vendors charge to confirm delivery, and some agencies add a margin. Published analysis of the CTV supply chain suggests roughly 45 to 55% of an advertiser's dollar arrives as working media. That is not unique to connected TV, since every programmatic channel has a fee stack, but it is rarely shown to buyers. Ask any CTV advertising agency for the breakdown before you commit.
Different rather than strictly better. Linear TV has a lower CPM, generally $10 to $15, but sells in packages with minimums most smaller advertisers cannot meet, and everyone in the transmission area sees the ad whether or not they could ever be your customer. CTV costs more per thousand impressions but only bills you for households you selected, and it can be measured. For a business with a defined service area the effective cost of reaching a relevant household is usually far lower on CTV even though the headline CPM is higher.
Through completion rate, cost per completed view, site visit lift among exposed households, branded search lift during the flight, and where budget allows a holdout group for genuine incrementality testing. CTV video completion typically exceeds 90% against roughly 62% for combined desktop and mobile video, and a healthy cost per completed view sits around $2 to $4. The important warning is that CTV drives direct and branded search traffic that last-click reporting hands to other channels, so judging connected TV on last-click alone will always understate it.
Yes. CTV supports DMA, city, ZIP code and radius targeting, which is the single biggest reason television became viable for local businesses. Expect tight geo-targeting to carry a premium of roughly 20 to 40% over broad national buys, which is almost always worth paying when the alternative is funding impressions outside your service area. The practical caution is that over-narrowing across several targeting layers at once shrinks the available inventory until campaigns cannot deliver.
You need a 15 or 30 second spot in standard broadcast quality. A vertical social video will not run, and a slideshow of stock photography will technically run but should not, because poor production looks considerably worse on a 55-inch screen than on a phone. Budget for creative as part of the campaign rather than as an afterthought to the media buy. We produce CTV spots as part of video production, and having something worth running is usually the difference between a campaign that works and one that merely delivers.
Supply grew faster than demand. Amazon made Prime Video ad-supported by default, Netflix and Disney+ launched and expanded ad tiers, and free streaming services added substantial further inventory. Reporting suggests this pushed CTV CPMs down roughly 10 to 30% through 2025. Analysts broadly expect 2026 to stabilise, with standard inventory settling around $20 to $25 while premium and tightly targeted placements hold $40 to $60. For mid-sized advertisers this is the most affordable entry point television has offered.
Almost always, and rarely on its own. Connected TV creates demand and awareness; something has to capture it when the household later searches your name or returns to your site. Without retargeting and a branded search campaign running underneath, you are paying to send potential customers toward whoever currently ranks for your category. The same principle applies to the destination: television traffic arrives with no click intent, so the page it eventually reaches needs to work, which is why we run conversion optimization alongside it.
Tell us your budget and where your customers are. We come back within one business day with the reach it genuinely buys and the fee stack behind it.
Your information is never sold or shared. We respond within one business day.
