The streaming revolution is well underway, but many TV advertisers still haven’t shown up.
According to Wurl’s March 2025 CTV Trends Report, ad fill rates across Connected TV (CTV) continue to decline year-over-year while the amount of available streaming ad inventory surges. There are now more shows, channels, and viewers than ever, particularly across Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV (FAST). It’s a case of abundant supply with slow moving demand as TV ad budgets are not fully distributed across the ad-supported streaming landscape and stuck in linear broadcast.
While audiences have moved en masse from traditional linear TV to streaming, advertisers haven’t kept pace. And despite eMarketer projecting ad spending to hit $32.57 billion in 2025 across CTV — nearly double what it was just four years ago — that spend isn’t being distributed efficiently across the ecosystem and causing publishers to see their ad fill rates in steady decline.
Part of the issue is systemic. In addition to TV budgets stuck in linear TV, a growing volume of streaming ad spend is trapped in walled gardens and DSPs that throttle and block requests, or routed through outdated programmatic infrastructure that wasn’t built for the scale, complexity, or fragmentation of the FAST ecosystem. Brands may want to be in streaming, but many are still buying like it’s 2015 — over-indexing on a handful of familiar apps while overlooking hundreds of high-performing channels with loyal, niche audiences.
As a result, publishers are sitting on premium inventory that goes unsold, something that’s not just frustrating, but a major missed opportunity on both sides of the marketplace. The trends continue to indicate the budgets are there, the inventory is certainly available, so now the efficiency and infrastructure of the marketplace have to keep up. A challenge faced in any maturing marketplace.
“The CTV market is maturing and how viewers consume content is changing,” stated Dave Bernath, GM of Americas at Wurl. “While streaming TV has established itself as a primary viewing destination, it hasn’t reached its full potential – with overall growth leveling off in terms of both time spent and monetization.”
Will we see a time when available ad inventory and advertiser demand are more aligned? It’s too big of an opportunity to miss, but it will take more of a shift from legacy TV thinking to a smarter, streaming-first strategy where the pipes allow for a steady flow of quality inventory and discovery, fragmentation is embraced and buying opportunities to reach engaged audiences are in high demand.
As a FAST publisher, we’re doing our part by distributing quality programming that’s seeing explosive growth in viewership and engagement across every major ad-supported streaming platform. It’s time for advertisers to seize the opportunity and take advantage of what the market is giving them.