Divvying Up the Growing Digital Ad Spend
All countries are feeling the expansionist incursions of larger streaming services and YouTube into the traditional broadcaster market share. Digital ad spend across Europe exceeded €118.9 billion in 2024, which amounts to 67.2% of all ad spend in Europe.
Research by Ampere Analysis from October 2024 reports that paid streaming revenue (combining subscriptions and advertising) surpassed public TV revenue (from taxes, license fees, and advertising) in Europe for the first time in 2024. IAB reports that the largest markets are the UK, Germany, Turkey, France, Italy, and Spain.
Display Ad Market Size 2024. Source: IAB Europe
But despite streaming’s gains on traditional linear, 2024 social digital ad spend grew by 1.5% over 2023, while video ad spend only grew by 0.5%.
This article will look at the state of CTV and streaming advertising and monetisation in the UK and EU, how the ad spend pie is divvied up, where CTV stands in relation to traditional broadcast, how the markets are trending, and what accounts for current growth patterns.
Advertising Makes Strong Inroads
Research also shows that Europe saw ad view growth at more than double the rate of the US from 2024 to 2024. According to the “FreeWheel Video Marketplace Report: 2H 2024,” ad views in Europe increased by 24% compared to 10% in the US.
“One of the key differences is that in Europe, most of the television is actually free to start with,” says Emmanuel Josserand, senior director of brand, agency, and industry relations at Comcast Advertising/FreeWheel.
The biggest differential between ad views in the US and Europe, according to FreeWheel, is in the CTV space. In the US, about 85% of ad views happen on CTV. In Europe, CTV accounts for only about 46% of all ad views. Here, the behaviour of watching live linear remains very ingrained. However, it’s important not to confuse CTV viewing overall with FAST, which still comprises only a small percentage of all European viewing (more on this later).
Across the UK and EU, much of the CTV inventory still sits within broadcasters’ own apps and is often not available to buy in an open
programmatic exchange. This inventory is tied up within the broadcaster environment (broadcaster video on demand, or BVOD), and so streaming only gets a smaller portion.
Hours viewed (in millions) by country for Netflix with Ads, November 2024–April 2025. Source: Digital i
When we look at market dynamics, programmatic buying, and share of revenues to different types of players in CTV, it all ends up coming back to the market structure. “The vast majority of European TV markets have been dominated by public service broadcasters, which often are protected to some degree by legislation or media regulation,” says Mike Shaw, director of EMEA ad sales at Roku. However, Roku does see room for growth and is soon to bring its own FAST service to the UK.
On the subscription side of the monetisation equation, as of June 2024, Bango reports that the average number of subscriptions per viewer
stands at UK 3.3, Germany 3.3, Spain 3.2, Italy 3.1, and France 3.0. The average annual spend per consumer at the time of the survey was €696. Sixty percent of viewers told Bango that they can’t afford all of the subscriptions they would prefer to have, and about one-third have shifted to ad-supported viewing.
“In 2025, the arrival of ad-supported tiers on SVOD platforms is fragmenting budgets,” says Edouard Lauwick, SVP of media, EMEA at Rakuten Advertising. These budgets are “now spread across more players—BVOD, SVOD, AVOD, FAST—as media planners aim to reach audiences everywhere,” he says. “While traditional broadcasters are preserving their share through BVOD, industry excitement is increasingly shifting toward the large-scale solutions offered by SVOD platforms, often seen as the ‘shiny new toy.’” Rakuten TV, he says, has been offering AVOD and FAST for several years, reaching more than 150 million households in 43 European territories.
“In Germany and France, we see strong adoption of ad-supported or ‘ad-lite’ SVOD services, perceived as more flexible and affordable than traditional pay TV,” Lauwick continues. “In Germany especially, there has never been a significant pay-per-view or pay TV market. Set-top boxes were almost absent, aside from Sky. Instead, public and private broadcasters quickly introduced AVOD/BVOD services via HbbTV (‘Mediatheken’), naturally guiding viewers toward ad-supported models.”
In the UK, Lauwick says, the market is more balanced between subscriptions and ad-supported offers. “In France, we are witnessing a shift from a box-TV-centric model toward an era of hyper-distribution, with major partnerships such as TF1 on Netflix or France Télévisions on AmazonPrime.”
This growth in ad-based viewing has likely occurred because many consumers are attempting to replace fee-based services with ad-based services. “Many of the formerly pure SVOD players are looking at hybrid models or introducing ad tiers,” says Martin Sebelius, CEO of Accedo.
According to research from Digital i, Netflix’s ad-tier views increased by 32% in the UK, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain between November 2024 and April 2025. The report states, “The biggest single increase was recorded in Germany, which saw a 44% rise in hours viewed on the Standard with Ads plan from 81.3 million to 116.9 million hours viewed. This was followed by 34% rises in Spain (from 59.9 million to 80.2 million) and the UK (from 150.7 million to 202.6 million), a 26% rise in France (from 129.1 million to 163.2 million) and a 22% rise in Italy (from 49.1 million to 60 million) in that period."
Hours viewed (in millions) by country for Netflix with Ads, November 2024–April 2025. Source: Digital i
“Our latest Xperi Video Trends Report: UK found that the average number of services used by UK viewers has steadily increased to 6.5,” says Chris Kleinschmidt, VP of EMEA advertising sales at Xperi. “We’re seeing a real behavioural shift that points to an increased desire for free content and a high ad tolerance across multiple devices. In fact, 42% of UK viewers now say they’d prefer an ad-supported streaming plan over paying more to skip ads.”
Buying Strategies
Roku’s Shaw says that traditionally, the European broadcast market primarily operated through five or six advertising agency holding companies with trading deals known as “share deals” with major broadcasters. “Essentially,” he says, this “meant that their rates would be determined by the share of spend that they would put with that broadcaster, and the broadcasters would all fight for increased share. Historically, you’d end up with 95% of all of the TV money locked up in these trading agreements with the public service or the big national broadcasters in Europe.”
Shaw reports that this TV share model is now giving way to “a far larger marketplace, with catalysts like the amount of TV viewing that YouTube now accounts for and Amazon Prime video inventory tied to lots more retail-led signals.” These developments open huge new markets for television, he says, and “are the types of dynamics that over the next 5 years are going to quite dramatically shape the way that TV investment decisions are made and the dollars are allocated.”
Joe Connors, DAZN’s VP of programmatic and advanced advertising, says the market dynamics are shifting in live sport as well. “There is strong global demand for DAZN’s advertising inventory, driven in large part by the unique value of our live content ‘appointment-to-view’ events,” he notes. “In EMEA, the supply landscape is evolving. Fewer publishers dominate the space, and levels of programmatic enablement vary across the region. However, when it comes to CTV, and particularly live sports, buying behaviour is largely consistent across markets. These environments are typically bought with intent and require guaranteed access, whether through direct or programmatic channels.”
Programmatic is a baby step into this level of automation. “Live sport content is normally oversold, particularly in Europe,” says FreeWheel’s Josserand. “For programmatic, a lot of the transactions are programmatic-guaranteed. It’s virtually an automated IO, but ultimately, you’re still going to have to go through each individual broadcaster to buy these inventories.”
While oversold could be a good thing for media sellers, the data on where content is viewed are interesting and open up more possibilities. In Europe, 77% of live content ad-viewing occurs on CTV. In the US, the number is slightly higher, according to FreeWheel.
Europe: Programmatic Ad Spend Growth (2024). Source: IAB Europe
The numbers diverge more dramatically on VOD ad-supported viewing. In the EU and UK, only 37% of VOD ad views take place on CTV (the remainder: 25% mobile, 25% set-top box VOD, and 13% desktop). In the US, a sizable 80% of VOD ad views happen on CTV.
The transition to ad-supported live viewing on CTV represents a more significant shift in Europe than it does in the US, in large measure because of the prevalence of public broadcasting. “Previously, public broadcasters were showing sports in each country, which means people are not used to having ads in their sports,” says Magnus Svensson, VP of sales and business development at Eyevinn Technology. “Now, since the streaming services have come in, fees went up, and piracy is increasing. I think we’ve reached a point where people are not willing to pay more for sports because it is ridiculously expensive. To get all the sports I want, I will probably pay $120 a month.”
What factor will provide the tipping point for injecting more advertising into sport and making it more palatable to European viewers? Svensson predicts that it will be “non-disruptive [ad formats] like L-banners, so you can still follow your sport and not get interrupted. Some of the sports, especially in Europe, are not really suited for advertising.”
A number of sport leagues have gravitated to YouTube TV, but watching matches on YouTube TV requires paying for a subscription and still sitting through ad-supported broadcasts. “There’s such a dichotomy of having a public broadcast on the one side and then monetising it through YouTube on the other side,” says Svensson.
New Entrants
Not surprisingly, the trend across the board in CTV viewing is more ads, more often. Roku’s Shaw offers a litany of examples of new or increased ad loads throughout the ecosystem: Netflix, Amazon, LG, Samsung, The Roku Channel, Rakuten TV, and Tubi. “All of these are growing far faster than broadcast to VOD, but they’re just a fraction of the size at the moment,” he says.
In April 2025, Spark Ninety and Thinkbox released a report on the proportion of CTV spend in the UK market: broadcaster VOD versus the amount of money that ends up outside of it with the new streamers. The report pegged revenue excluding BVOD at £236 million in 2024, with 143% year-over-year growth from SVOD, AVOD, and FAST (DAZN, Discovery+, Disney+, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Pluto TV, Rakuten TV, Samsung TV Plus, and Vevo). Overall TV advertising investment in the UK totaled £5.27 billion in 2024, up 3.8% year on year. Total TV includes revenue from linear TV and VOD spot ads, sponsorship, product placement, and advertiser-funded programming. Social was not included in the report.
“Essentially, it’s about an 80/20 split in favour of the broadcasters,” Shaw says. “Non-broadcast is growing faster, and that’s really where all of the programmatic innovation has historically been centered.” In Europe, he contends, “there’s 15%–20% in the open marketplace, and most of it’s not being transacted [programmatically]. The control of the market by broadcast and the ownership of those trading relationships are really the genesis of all of that.”
Summary of key 2024 growth drivers. Source: IAB Europe
Expanding the Pie
On the FAST side of the equation, where a channel’s 24/7 linear stream typically has 6–8 minutes of ads (depending on the country), FreeWheel’s Josserand estimates that 30% of US ad views are going through FAST. In Europe, he says, that number remains closer to 10%.
“In FAST, everything is based on programmatic, technically speaking. That being said, the market by itself is getting quite low fees,” says Cedric Monnier, CEO of Okast. In Europe, FAST is “not yet mature enough to be completely programmatic, and I’m not sure it would be good if it were.” Direct sales for the big brands and special events provide more brand safety and arguably a higher-quality experience than what viewers often get with programmatic.
The biggest payoff for FAST is a way to engage an audience. “We followed people moving from Pluto, Samsung, or Rakuten to a YouTube channel or to specific websites,” Monnier adds. “When it’s done, we have very interesting cases where we have a 30% conversion rate.”
Just as politics make strange bedfellows, so does trying to expand market share. One visible recent trend finds streaming-native companies making deals to work with the more traditional media companies, particularly in areas where traditional broadcasters have excelled.
“Where broadcasters are different is they’ve got a lot of live [local] content,” says Josserand. “Local is really, really important. TF1 just announced that they’re going to be on Netflix. TV France is going to go into Prime Video. I think something that was missing in those large global platforms is the local content.”
Josserand goes on to note that “in France, we saw almost 100% growth” of programmatic advertising on CTV. “But because you’re starting from such a low starting point, obviously it grows very quickly. [This] will plateau at some point, but we’re still in that growth phase right now.”
Josserand explains that in Europe, programmatic advertising accounts for less than 20% of the overall advertising market. “Now, there’s a lot of discrepancies between the European countries,” he notes. France and Spain are 30% programmatic, he says, whereas that number is as low as 5% or 10% in other European countries.
“France is one of the last remaining European markets in which the weekly viewing time of scheduled linear TV exceeds that of subscription OTT,” Ampere Analysis reported in a June 2025 article on the Netflix-TF1 carriage deal. “Despite being the leading streaming service in France, Netflix’s penetration currently sits at 48% of connected homes in France in 2025, making up 13.7m subscribers, compared to around 60% in the UK and USA.” The hope, Ampere Analysis contends, is that this deal will expand the addressable market to 84%, including three
groups: TF1 (23%), TF1 combined with Netflix (32%), and Netflix only (29%).
“Recently, we’ve seen Channel Four, ITV, and Sky in the UK create what they call the ‘UK marketplace’ to make it easy and simple for small and medium-sized companies to access premium inventory, which was not possible before,” says Josserand. “It’s always perceived as too expensive or too complicated.” This long tail of advertisers includes hundreds of thousands that previously could not access premium video inventory but were advertising with the likes of Google and Meta.
“What I’ve seen lately is that there are also a lot of self-service platforms for selling ad spots instead of doing programmatic,” says Eyevinn’s Svensson. “There are a few broadcasters in Europe and the Nordics that have developed a portal where advertisers can go into, let’s say, TV4 in Sweden, log into their portal, and buy their ad spots themselves without any human interaction. I see that happening more than actual broadcasters going to programmatic.”
The Language of Data
“If you want to become better at monetisation, you need a data foundation,” says Accedo’s Sebelius. “You might think that video service providers are there, but very few of them are. You need a 360-degree data view, and you need that data to be unified.”
This data can reference infrastructure, application, and video playback performance, coupled with user behaviour (engagement, churn, viewing time), social feedback, user data (location, language, demographics, content views) and advertising stats (ad impressions, view-through rates, engagement).
“Visualise one dashboard with all of the data in it,” Sebelius advises, and platforms will not only find themselves equipped to “handle the volume [of data], but also make something out of the complexity and make it actionable.”
How is this data being used for ad targeting? “In Europe, contextual and geo-targeting (via IP address) currently dominate, largely due to the cookie-less environment and the fact that buying is often led by TV teams historically focussed on content and geography,” says Rakuten’s Lauwick. Outside the UK (where biddable programmatic advertising is available), open auction for CTV is practically nonexistent; everything is handled via managed services or private deals (programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace). “For live sports,” Lauwick explains, “programmatic buying has improved thanks to SSPs/DSPs now [being] able to handle huge inventory spikes in short time frames.”
“At DAZN, we’ve partnered with LiveRamp, The Trade Desk, and Display & Video 360 to support identifiers such as RampID, EUID, and
Pair ID, enabling buyers to activate their own first-party data,” says Connors. “This brings powerful audience targeting capabilities to what is often a new and premium environment for advertisers—TV, streaming, and live sports.”
In the UK, according to Marius Rausch, global head of Microsoft Monetize, there is “more openness to audience-based targeting and programmatic access” than elsewhere in Europe. “Agencies are more comfortable with audience-led strategies and are more actively exploring unified planning and measurement across screens,” he says. “Germany and France remain more conservative, with a slower shift toward programmatic advertising in CTV. Direct IOs still play a significant role, especially with national broadcasters who often retain close control over their CTV inventory (and sometimes operate quasi-walled gardens).”
The US, by contrast, “has a strong emphasis on audience-based targeting powered by identity graphs, third-party data, and clean room partnerships,” Rausch says. “Contextual targeting remains dominant, driven by enforcement of GDPR, limited data interoperability, and a fragmented identity landscape. However, some larger media houses are more and more open to make inventory available to programmatic, particularly through private auction setups, signaling a gradual shift toward more flexible buying methods.”
In terms of the proportion of programmatic to direct CTV advertising, Lauwick says, “The US is close to 100% programmatic, followed by the UK. In France, it’s around 50/50, and in Germany, it’s about 30% direct and 70% programmatic, similar to southern Europe. On new large-screen display formats—such as Switchin XXLs (known as ATV in Germany), billboards, or mastheads on the TV home screen—it’s still 100% direct IO,” Lauwick says.
“Looking at where CTV stands in larger markets is an obvious tell-tale sign of what’s to come in the UK and EU,” says Xperi’s Kleinschmidt. “Fundamentally, CTV spending in the US dwarfs that of Europe, with US spend estimated to be $26.6 billion in 2025, according to the [US] Interactive Advertising Bureau’s latest report. One of the main reasons for this gap is that CTV in the US is largely transacted programmatically and specifically in the open marketplace. There are far more publishers in the US, making their inventory available through these exchanges, allowing buyers to really lean into the ad technology and home in on the right audiences in real time.”
AI in Advertising
While the infusion of streamers into the various markets has still not pushed programmatic to the forefront very quickly in most of Europe, AI is likely to turn the tide. This transformation will begin in business planning and buying impact because it will be easier to find places to insert ads.
Certain types of content, such as some sports, series, and movies, naturally lend themselves to ad breaks and are thus expected (or at least more easily accepted) by viewers. “In the nonlinear ad world, there is no default timing, as ads can be placed at any point in time,” says Olivier Karra, cloud solutions marketing director at Broadpeak. “This is where we see AI coming into play by analyzing and extracting metadata describing scene changes, camera shots, attention level, emotion level, and context.”
Karra goes on to predict that AI will help advertisers to maximise ad campaign efficiency by dynamically setting up, tracking, and adjusting in real time. He says that at present, “Inventory transactions, even programmatic, are still somehow initially provisioned by agencies, publishers, or AdOps before they are executed. Going one step further in automatically assessing and ranking marketplaces, business opportunities, deal types, priorities, ad format units, and audience data has obvious potential.”
The next area primed for AI enhancement will be targeting. “It’s also improving personalisation and doing it in a way that’s GDPR-
compliant. With tools like ACR and first-party data, we can target more relevant ads without relying on cookies, which is increasingly important across the UK and EU,” says Kleinschmidt.
Another much-needed area on the operations and user experience side will be QoS. “Ad delivery across different TVs is a mess,” says Kleinschmidt. “Creative specs vary by year, brand, and model. What runs smoothly on a 2016 LG might not work on a 2023 Samsung. AI is stepping in to help standardise that process across devices and platforms. When it comes to CTV, it’s more than just hype. It’s already helping fix some very real challenges.”
One example Kleinschmidt cites is duplication. “About 51% of people use a secondary device, like a Fire Stick or game console, alongside their smart TV. That can result in multiple ads playing simultaneously, often paid for by the same advertiser.” This is far from ideal, he says. “AI is now being used to spot and remove these overlapping impressions, saving brands from paying twice for the same moment.”
Another area everyone talks about AI changing is production. “I think that’s where AI is going to play a crucial role in enabling the creation of ads very cheaply and very quickly” for small and medium-sized businesses, says Josserand. “One of the things that has sometimes been a barrier to entry is that creating an ad for TV is quite expensive.”
Ad Load Limits and the Future of Ad Viewing
Here’s an interesting point that Josserand interjects, which almost sounds like it contradicts the increased ad-viewing stats cited at the beginning of this article: “TV in Europe is massively regulated. You can’t go beyond 12 minutes per hour of ads.”
In fact, the competition between the streaming companies and incumbent broadcasters has helped keep ad loads down. “Because of those new streamers that came into the market, like Netflix, with no ads, we are seeing a lot less ads on streaming than on a linear television in general,” Josserand adds. “There’s rarely more than three ads [at a time]. The pods are shorter. You even now have a countdown of the ads, and I think almost everyone is doing it as well.”
CTV viewing and hence CTV ad viewing did not exist a few years ago, so the growth rates, regardless of country, tend to be dramatic. When you start from nothing, any increase will look substantial. The statistic we should be really focussed on is not what the overall growth rate in ad viewing looks like or even how much market share streaming companies have compared to traditional broadcasters, but how social and social advertising are growing. Again, in the last year, social digital ad spend grew by 1.5%, while video ad spend only grew by 0.5%.
Advertising is an industry of many contradictions. Do buyers and sellers speak openly about CPMs? Rarely. Netflix came out with its original projected premium rate in the US of $65 (€74) in 2022. 2025 rates reported in The Wall Street Journal ranged from $29 to $35 (€25-€30). Digiday reports Q4 2024 insertion order pricing CPMs starting at £44.50 ($55.40) in the UK, €37 ($38) in France, and €58 ($60) in Germany. One agency media buyer said that private marketplace pricing in each market would likely be 20% cheaper than direct IOs.
A number of people interviewed for this article spoke about how self-serve ad exchanges are coming into various markets. Representatives of large companies in the US commented on this as well when I spoke with them at CES 2024. The biggest challenge is how to move faster and address the impact of programmatic. AI is coming for ad budgets, and its effect on CTV advertising will happen faster than anything we’ve seen before.
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