Happy Monday War & Peaceniks! Ready for the score??
Recently I announced a collab with Comscore for their new ad exposure metric and dataset The Score Report, which focuses not on what everyone’s watching, but rather on how what’s being watched gets monetized. It must’ve struck a chord, because it became the most read post in Media War & Peace history.
In that announcement I teased a big drop of the full dataset. The teaser offered some stunning data for 2Q 2024. Comscore has given me exclusive access to the complete data from The Score Report, covering ad exposure across Broadcast, Pay TV, and Streaming, for all of 1H 2024. This creates a new TV measurement metric, which I call Share of Ad Voice.
Below is my complete analysis of this remarkably deep data - which combines Comscore’s television audience products, Comscore TV and Comscore Total Home Panel; with Smart TV and ACR data from Inscape and Samba TV. If you want my full report as a PDF, you can download it here.
So much of the current conversation around TV viewing is shrouded in a fog of confusing data. IMHO, The Score Report counts the data that counts. The best example of this is how this new product tracks the amount of advertising exposure on each channel, network, and streaming platform, rather than pure viewership. This is why we measure TV audiences - not for our egos but for our businesses. And when you look at what really matters, the Share of Ad Voice, much of our conventional wisdom gets turned on its headend.
So much of the hype around connected television right now focuses almost exclusively on streamers and their shiny new ad tiers or on FAST and the return of linear viewing on digital. Yet…
In the first half of 2024, 86.93% of all ad time on TV was viewed on Pay TV or Broadcast. Just 13.07% of TV ad time was seen on streaming platforms.
This is an even more dramatic advantage for Cable and Broadcast than the numbers from 2Q. [And yes, Comscore took this collab so seriously, they turned my head into an icon. They really get me.]
This shows just how important live, daily engagement is for television advertising. Yes, streaming is a massive viewing habit among US audiences. And, the combo of Pay TV and Broadcast still commands far more daily, ad-supported, live viewing than the streamers - and it will continue to do so for some time to come.
The mass legacy of Broadcast and the ingrained habit of Cable TV combine to keep a hold on the vast majority of ad supported TV time in the US. This is not just among older TV viewers (like me), but also among Millennial heads of household, turning to virtual Cable bundles like YouTube TV (now the fourth largest MVPD in America) Hulu Live, and Fubo. As the data shows below, much of this stems from viewers’ need for live news and sports. But, in my studied opinion, a good deal of the continued daily Pay TV habit comes from a growing frustration with finding things to watch on Streaming (logging on and off streamers only to wind up watching nothing) and a reliable belief that on Pay TV and Broadcast, there is “always something to watch.” That is a discovery problem streamers must recognize and address if they ever want to stem the rising tide of churn.
However, this data focusses on ad viewing. And the main reason Pay TV and Broadcast are so dominant in Share of Ad Voice is because most SVOD ad tiers are still very immature revenue streams, with limited engagement, and low inventory fill. That said, there are exceptional Streaming exceptions. [Note: ACR data directly from OEMs are not currently captured, so Roku, Samsung, LG, Vizio, and TCL are not yet included within The Score Report.]
Broadcasters’ reach and long developed advertising muscles delivered them more than 40% of all ad viewing in the first six months of 2024. CBS had a strong first half of 2024, as the only broadcaster to surpass 10% of ad exposure, with ABC and NBC taking silver and bronze. However…
YouTube was within striking distance of FOX and bested all Cable networks. This is indicative of the rapid evolution of YouTube from “social video” to mainstream TV platform.
Fox News remains atop the Cable crowd, but Hulu has a remarkably strong Share of Ad Voice, ahead the rest of Pay TV and all the other premium streamers (note that neither Netflix nor Prime made the Top 20), built from a much longer history in the streaming ad game. This is precisely why Hulu is a major piece of Disney’s long-term TV puzzle.
As mentioned, News and Sports power the top tier Pay TV players, with MSNBC second among cablers, followed by ESPN and CNN – ahead of Broadcasters CW (who has also been playing in sports of late), ION, Univision, and Telemundo. TNT and TBS also relied heavily on sports to make the Top 20, which makes home and hearth network HGTV and movie reliant Hallmark’s appearances here relatively impressive by comparison.
Netflix’s ad tier launched two years ago but only managed one-half of one percent of total television ad views for the first half of 2024. Amazon just debuted their new ad tier in January but was able to pass rival Netflix in a relatively short time.
Meanwhile Tubi is not just the clear leader in FAST, FOX’s AVOD platform beats out Broadcasters Univision and Telemundo, as well as major cablers like TBS, Food Network, and USA, and rose above all the premium SVOD platforms with ad tiers. In fact…
Tubi’s Share of Ad Voice for the entire first half of the year is than more than 250% bigger than both Netflix and Amazon Prime; and 40% bigger than both premium streamers combined.
FAST platform Pluto TV lands at #28, topping all SVOD ad players not named Hulu, including Paramount+ (its sister platform at #50), Peacock (at #31), Disney+ (#67), MAX (#93), and AMC+ (#164), as well as the rest of FAST (OEMs are not included in this report) for all of 1H 2024.
The range of the Top 50 Share of Ad Voice demonstrates just how formidable Broadcast reach remains, even in the Connected TV era. A sizable portion of this is due to live programming, including morning and nightly news programs on each of the big three Broadcasters, and of course sports, one of the major pillars of the Broadcast audience.
That said, while the ad tiers of many premium streaming platforms have yet to mature past the point of 1% of ad time, clearly YouTube (#5) and Hulu (#7) are TV advertising forces to be reckoned with – especially given their attractive, young audiences.
As a whole, Pay TV garnered 43% of ad exposure in the first half of the year. Considering most Broadcast TV (43.6% of ad exposure) is also viewed via Pay TV packages, America’s MVPDs can currently boast a major share of ad time viewed. Individually, however, most cable channels on the remote do not crack 1% share of ad voice. As premium streamers pick up the pace of their ad tiers and YouTube continues to lean into TV, Cable will find its ad place increasingly challenged.
Advertising deals are typically done by corporate channel group. Which brings us back to the chart that started this post…
On a national basis, Disney combines Broadcast, cable, and streaming to establish a respectable lead over all the competition so far in 2024, with NBCU and Paramount neck and neck at second and third.
The top four corporate TV combatants now all boast combinations of Broadcast, Cable, and Streaming. WBD is the only big, traditional media company in the top five without a Broadcast platform, and one wonders what will happen to their share of ad voice when they lose the NBA, which drove much of their ad exposure in the first half of this year.
Seeing Netflix and Amazon a distance behind competitors like Hallmark and Nexstar for Share of Ad Voice shows how early in their ad supported journeys they are. Conversely, Disney’s pole position, Google’s rising tide, and FOX’s Tubi speak to the growing power of the streamers on television.
Nexstar, Hallmark, Televisa, AMCN, A+E, EW Scripps, Weigel, INSP, SONY, AMG, Sinclair, Urban One, Gray, and Sunbeam, all make it into the Top 25 Channel Groups. But they will all need to up their streaming games to continue to compete. Meanwhile, the MLB Network falling behind the NFL Network demonstrates the massive power of the NFL, even in the off season.
My goal in collaborating with Comscore around The Score Report is to provide an accurate and useful understanding of TV audiences by elevating a new way of measuring them. Total viewing measurement without proper context does not help the media buyers for whom television measurement is intended, nor the media community who needs to monetize viewing now, more than ever.
Moving forward, combining Comscore’s data and my analysis, this collab will strive to provide more and more actually actionable metrics and insights each month - including the Top 20 players in Broadcast, Pay TV, and Streaming, as well as rolling four-week data for the Share of Ad Voice on TV.
The marketplace is full of studies and charts, data and reports. I was thrilled to collaborate with Comscore and get exclusive access to The Score Report because they have the data to empower our industry and the foresight to offer us the kind of transparency we need to move our business forward.
As always, my goal here is not just to say some thing, but to say something.
As the battle for television ad dollars intensifies, big tech companies ramp up their TV ad businesses, and television viewing continues to fragment and evolve, it is increasingly important to sort the data wheat from the measurement chaff and know where the audiences of television advertising are actually watching TV ads. I believe Share of Ad Voice does that.
If you want want to download my full report as a PDF, click this link.
Please let me know what you think! As always, I value your feedback and I hope you will let me how to make my analysis more useful for you.
Enjoy the week!
ESHAP
Have you, or do you intend to, dive into the historical data? I'm particularly interested to see how quickly, or slowly, streaming advertising is growing. Is that 3.6% share from Hulu an indication of growing share, or has it been stagnant at this level for some time? You pointed out that Netflix is growing slower than Prime, but is Netflix still on a growth trajectory that will move it past broadcast television services in a few years... or months?
I'm sure these stats will become of greater value as they are tracked over time, but as of right now: who could be surprised that the players with the largest legacy media holdings, whose businesses have rested for decades on the ad-supported model, currently command a huge lead in "share of ad voice" over those who are relatively new to the ad game? Sure, "legacy media is dead," except, according to Statista, as of August 2024, broadcast and cable still account for 47% of TV viewing time. And, at least at this point in time, the ad load per hour is a whole lot higher in broadcast and cable than it is for streaming. Also, while it's an interesting and surprising factoid that Tubi has a greater "share of ad voice" than Netflix, Tubi is a strictly ad-supported model, with no subscriber revenue, and it remains an open question as to whether Tubi can become a profitable business or not. (To be clear: I'm rooting for anyone who can figure out how the television business can be profitable again!) With nearly all major streamers leaning into a hybrid subscription/ad-supported model, it would seem that any conversation about "the score" in monetizing content must include both subscription and advertising revenue.