• SpotX: OTT Ad Spending Up 18x Over Past 12 Months

    SpotX has revealed that ad spending on its platform for OTT inventory increased by 18x for the 12 months ending October 2017. SpotX defines OTT inventory as including broadcast-quality inventory from TV networks, pay-TV operators and other live, linear and VOD streaming services delivered via connected TVs, desktop and mobile. SpotX said the portion of ad budgets spent on OTT inventory increased from 8% in Oct. ’16 to 26% in Oct. ’17, with 30% expected by end of the year.

    SpotX said that over 65 different demand side platforms buy ads with SpotX’s platform, but it called out 5 of them - Adobe Advertising Cloud, dataxu, The Trade Desk, VideoAmp and ZypMedia as the top DSPs for OTT inventory. For these 5, SpotX said daily spend on OTT has increased over 675% since January.

    SpotX’s ad spending data builds on larger trends around the consumption of premium video on connected TVs. As adoption of CTVs has soared and more ad-supported apps with premium content have become available, the percentage of ad-supported viewing has increased and the percentage of ad-free SVOD consumption on these devices has declined.

    For example, whereas not long ago using a Roku to watch Netflix was predominant, now Roku is seeing its fastest consumption growth happening with ad-supported video. This in turn translates to huge inventory increases and therefore more ad spending. With connected TVs poised to be a very popular holiday gift, these trends are almost certain to continue into 2018.