By 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.
"The work OpenX has done in biddable CTV is unlocking the best of both worlds, combining premium TV inventory with the flexibility and precision of digital," said Rose McGovern, head of programmatic and digital ad sales at DirecTV, in Digiday.
Verdict: biddable is not a nice-to-have anymore. If your CTV strategy is still 100% upfront commitments, you are leaving optimization, and probably margin, on the table.
Linear is bleeding out, and the crossover is coming
The IAB reported that marketers reallocated 36% of linear TV ad spend to CTV in 2025. Streaming captured 47.5% of all U.S. TV viewing in December 2025, per Nielsen. And eMarketer projects CTV ad spending will surpass traditional TV for the first time in 2028, when CTV hits $46.89 billion and linear falls to roughly $45 billion.
That crossover is two years away. For media buyers still running 60/40 linear-to-CTV splits, the question is simple: are you planning for where eyeballs are, or where they were?
Netflix alone tells the story. Its ad tier revenue exceeded $1.5 billion in 2025 and is expected to double in 2026, according to CNBC. Disney+ keeps expanding its 157 million ad-supported viewers. Amazon Prime Video launched its ad tier in January 2024, and it already reaches most Prime subscribers. These platforms are still in the early stages of ad monetization. The supply is only growing.
Verdict: if you are waiting for the crossover to reallocate, you will be buying at peak CPMs alongside everyone else who waited too long.
The quality problem nobody wants to talk about
More inventory does not automatically mean better inventory. According to Basis Technologies, 54% of advertisers believe generative AI has contributed to a decline in overall media quality. AI-generated content farms can deliver impressive impression counts that look legitimate in your reporting dashboard but translate to zero brand recall.
This is not a hypothetical concern. It is already eating campaign budgets. The deck says "premium CTV placements." The invoice shows impressions served on screensaver apps and weather tickers miscategorized as connected TV. I have seen it happen. So have you, if you are honest about your log-level data.
The good news: the industry is responding. Pre-bid protections, curated supply paths, and solutions that strip out resellers and non-TV content from the CTV pool are maturing. 84% of CTV is now transacted programmatically, per Nielsen, which means the programmatic pipes themselves need to be clean.
Verdict: do not let the growth numbers distract you from supply path hygiene. More spend flowing through dirty pipes just means more waste at scale.
What to do Monday morning
The $200 billion programmatic number and the $38 billion CTV number are real. The shift to biddable is real. The quality risk is also real. Here is how to act on all three.
First, audit your CTV mix. What percentage is upfront versus biddable? If you cannot answer that question, start there. You should be running at least 30-40% biddable to take advantage of real-time optimization, especially for performance campaigns.
Second, demand supply path transparency from every CTV partner. Ask for seller.json files. Ask which exchanges your impressions actually clear through. If a vendor cannot answer, that tells you everything.
Third, stop comparing CTV to linear on a CPM basis alone. CTV CPMs run higher, but the targeting precision and measurement capabilities (household-level attribution, frequency management across devices) make the effective cost per qualified reach significantly lower. Compare cost per completed view against a matched audience, not raw CPMs.
Fourth, build your first-party data strategy now. With only 30% of agencies and brands having fully adopted AI across campaigns (per IAB data cited by Adtelligent), the teams that have clean, structured audience data will have a measurable advantage in programmatic optimization.
The TV advertising industry is not "evolving." It already evolved. The $200 billion programmatic market and the CTV channel eating linear alive are not predictions. They are the current scoreboard. The only question is whether your media plan reflects the game as it is or the game as it was.
Mira Castellano covers ad tech for The Daily Vibe.
