Seventy-five percent. That is the share of CTV advertising already purchased programmatically, according to Digiday. If you are still pitching your CMO on "testing into connected TV," you are not early. You are late.
The numbers got big enough to stop ignoring. U.S. CTV ad spending is projected to hit approximately $38 billion in 2026, up from $33.35 billion in 2025 and $28.6 billion in 2024, according to eMarketer. That is 14% year-over-year growth in a channel that some buyers still treat like an experiment. Meanwhile, global programmatic ad spend is forecast to surpass $200 billion this year, per The Magazine Manager. U.S. programmatic display alone is expected to exceed $203 billion, representing 12.5% year-over-year growth, according to eMarketer data cited by Basis Technologies.
Nine streaming platforms will exceed $1 billion in ad revenue in 2026, up from just two in 2020, according to eMarketer. CTV now accounts for one-fifth of daily media consumption among U.S. adults. These are not projections from a vendor deck trying to sell you inventory. These are industry consensus numbers.
So why are so many media plans still built like it is 2019?
The biddable shift changes the math
I have seen this pitch before: "CTV gives you the reach of TV with the targeting of digital." Fine. But for years, the execution did not match the promise. Upfront commitments locked budgets months ahead. Inventory quality was a coin flip. Resellers made it impossible to know what you were actually buying.
Biddable CTV changed that equation. Non-guaranteed PMPs, curated deals, and open market inventory now let buyers optimize in real time, the way they have been doing with display and video for a decade. According to StackAdapt, 47% of advertisers now expect CTV inventory to be biddable. That number is headed in one direction.
The results back it up. Publishers using biddable CTV solutions saw a 22% increase in monetized impressions while buyer CPMs remained relatively flat, according to Beet.tv. Read that again: publishers made more money and buyers did not pay more for it. That is the rare scenario where both sides of the table actually win.
