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Where YouTube is Ahead of the Other Streamers on Ads
00:27:00
Next in Media spoke with Ross Benes, senior analyst at eMarketer about the flood of new ad inventory in CTV, whether brands are really embracing addressable TV ads in a big way, and why we're currently obsessed with 90s trash culture.
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- [00:01]
A
Accurate up to date customer information is critical to your business growth. It all starts with quality data. Epsilon has spent decades ethically sourcing the industry's top ranked consumer database, covering every marketable U.S. household. With a commitment to transparency and privacy. See how you'll predict future buying behaviors and build a lifetime of customer loyalty. Discover the deepest customer Insights available at epsilon.com data that's epsilon.com data this week on Nexty Media, I spoke with eMarketer senior analyst Ross Benech. Ross and I talked about his streaming predictions for 2025 hint that involved sports rights deals and the state of the TV ad market and why YouTubers perhaps surprised me. Ahead on one front, Ross and I also talked about his new book 1999 the Year that Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our bizarre Times and why our current climate can be traced to this turn of the century appetite we had for TV trash. Let's get hi everybody, I'm Mike Shields, this is Next in Media. My guest this week is Ross Bennes. He's a senior analyst at eMarketer. Hey Ross, thanks for being here.
- [01:11]
B
Good to be here, Mike.
- [01:12]
A
I'm glad to catch you. As we will get into you are in the middle of a very wide ranging book tour, which is exciting, so I'm glad to be part of that. But I want to start getting into what you cover day to day. You know the you've been writing a lot about the streaming ad market over the last couple years. It's taken off like crazy as as we'll talk about. It's interesting to look at a lot some of your posts towards the end of last year where you're talking about streaming and CTV advertising specifically blowing up, but yet linear is still hanging in very strongly when you when you look at it through an ad viewer time lens. So can you maybe just like set the stage and sort out that contradiction? If you don't mind?
- [01:51]
B
Yeah, sure thing. There's a few ways to look at how fast has streaming grown. Like if you just look at time spent, it's damn near 50% of all time spent with television. You know, it's like in the 40s. But if you look at advertising time spent according to data from comScore, it's closer to like 15%. It's much lower. So despite all the new ad tiers, all the increased in end time spent with streaming, linear is the king by far. It's about six times the amount of revenue is streaming. And the reasons are pretty simple. It's that even though streaming inventory has Increased so much, the ad loads are still way lighter than linear. And you have a ton of people, especially on Netflix, who opt out of seeing advertising.
- [02:38]
A
Streaming started out when it was almost totally non ad supported or primarily not ad supported. And you're still seeing that lingering effect where there's a huge Netflix audience that is always paid for it without advertising. And then on Switch and you got throwing prime and Max and things like that. But. But it is interesting to me that even with Amazon blowing up the marketplace with so much more inventory, it's just going to take a while for the ad avail number to catch up.
- [03:05]
B
Oh yeah, that, that's going to be the last laggard out of the like primary metrics of, you know, comparing streaming to linear tv. The first one that's going to exceed is time spent. Streaming time spent is going to eclipse linear very soon. And then you have ad spending that's, that's a few years down the line, you know, probably 2028, let's say somewhere around there. But then add time spent, that's kicking the can down the road. I mean you probably won't see that till like 2030. And, and Brian Weezer has written about this too, where what's going to happen as you shift from linear viewing to primarily streaming viewing is just overall inventory.
- [03:44]
A
Will shrink each smaller bucket.
- [03:46]
B
Right, Exactly. So it'll just be a smaller bucket because if I'm watching linear TV for a few hours per day, I'm seeing 15 minutes of ads per hour no matter what network I'm seeing. Really that there just isn't an equivalent in that in streaming. Like the ad loads are higher on the free services, but people aren't spending hours per day on Tubi. You know, they tend to spend it on Max or Netflix if they have an account with.
- [04:09]
A
I was going to say what could shift that pretty dramatically would be more and more sports, which is already happening. But you're right, there isn't that. I'm going to watch Roadhouse and on TBS and it's going to take three hours because there's so much advertising and that's, that was so much of cable. That dynamic is not happening in streaming. If, if it is that there, there's a danger that you can actually ruin things. You're not, you know, you're likely not going to see that for a while.
- [04:33]
B
No, not for a while. And I mean you will still see people like I'm going to go watch a old rerun or you know, a syndicated show on Tubi or Pluto, something that's going to be very high ad loads relative to rest of streaming. But you're not going to have Roadhouse turn into a three hour movie. You might. You're going to have an hour and a half movie turn into a two hour movie instead.
- [04:54]
A
I was happy to sit for Roadhouse was worth a three hour away from, from much of my life.
- [04:58]
B
I watched Titanic on TNT a bunch of times as a kid and it sounds like you're home the whole day. Yeah, that's like four and a half hours or something like that.
- [05:06]
A
Funny. All right, when I want to come back to some of these points. But when you look at CTV's growth overall, it's interesting because on the one hand it's like the numbers are great, the market's really strong, it's blowing up. Yeah. You see a lot of the big media companies, they're having a tougher time for their businesses overall and they're scrambling to grow this business and capture as much of it as they can. So I guess it's a long way of asking where is the money coming from right now? Is it still mostly old TV money moving over looking for GRPs? Are you still really seeing the growth come from all this sophisticated targeting that CCD promises?
- [05:43]
B
Most of the money has been those traditional advertisers. I mean, you know, they have when the inventory was scarce especially there wasn't a lot to dole out to smaller advertisers who had lower budgets, you know, and you see that whenever there's like a new big sporting event that's kind of splashy, like you know when Thursday Night Football launch or prime video, but then also raw on Netflix and the NFL game on Netflix, it's handled like a traditional telecast. And the advertising, it's the same brands that, you know, if you watch the Chiefs on Christmas on Netflix, you know.
- [06:13]
A
What it looks like? It looks like that it was the.
- [06:15]
B
Same brands you'd see on tbs, I mean on CBS or Fox. So that's been in my view most of streaming ad spending outside of YouTube, like streaming on the subscription services. I think that's changing though. So the streaming services, Roku and Disney plus and now Comcast and I think Paramount as well have introduced products, they've made announcements where they are targeting small and mid sized advertisers more. So while it has looked a lot like traditional tv, you're starting to see some more advertisers that you would see on social video but weren't on linear, you're going to see more performance advertisers More advertisers with you know just a a smaller budget their creative isn't going to have you know like Beyonce in it or, or you know these a list celebrities. It's going to be a different type.
- [07:01]
A
Of ad but there's a lot more tools in the market for helping for.
- [07:06]
B
Sure that that are baking on this. There's several different types of vendors that are basically building their business on this thing happening. So there is a lot of money behind it to get this momentum going. And then for the streaming services that means you have a lot more advertisers you could target. There's only so many Fortune companies if you go after the smaller brands like you do what Facebook did. But not that is the.
- [07:29]
A
That is the why Facebook and Google have been so. One of the many reasons so successful is they have such a vast ad pull and why wouldn't TV want that? But in the meantime you're right there are all these self service platforms launching going for that smaller advertiser. There's so much talk about all the bring your email list and do a clean room match, do all this cool targeting and then mesh it with your data driven linear. I don't have a real sense of whether the big traditional TV advertisers are actually doing a whole lot of addressable stuff in television yet. What is your sense?
- [08:01]
B
Well if it's ctv I mean it would have the addressable capability, you know whether they use it or not. But on the splashiest shows, on those top 10 shows and on sports, I mean it looks a lot like just a generic ad is placed and it's the largest brands and they are buying it kind of old school. You know you probably see more that targeting really on, on YouTube they're the ones to do it the best. Like you know I think brands are trying to target on some of these streaming services but when I watch any of the fast services I just see the same ads in the same pod and they're probably targeting me like that. Probably in the market for Geico Insurance, probably not.
- [08:41]
A
Whatever.
- [08:43]
B
Yeah, sometimes I may. Yeah. Who knows by varies by device if I'm logged in or not or which account I'm logged into. But God that gets irritating. It doesn't feel super relevant after 40 minutes. But on YouTube you know you really start to see some like things based off my search history I think is what a lot of it is like I get a lot of ads for like little handy tools that I probably watched a tutorial on how to use them because I can't Fix anything in my house without watching a YouTube video. I think they're doing all this advanced targeting and advertisers that work with them are, you know, it's just more difficult to do that across the board Elsewhere.
- [09:20]
A
With regards to YouTube has been a big topic the last couple years and you mentioned Brian Weezer has written about this recently. He wavers between whether YouTube counts as TV or not and whether it should be, whether brands are, you know, distributing their budgets that way. What have you seen are brands you Talk to lumping YouTube in as CTV and buying everything together, evaluating it together or not necessarily.
- [09:42]
B
I'm, yeah, I'm aware of this debate. I'm sure there are advertisers who exclude YouTube. So I don't want to say no one does, you know, because maybe the video isn't viewed as premium or that experience isn't as viewed as premium, but those who do so are kind of kidding themselves because it's, it's the most consumed video service in the United States. I mean actually globally really and you know the such a large part of it is on tv. So I think the share of advertisers who are convinced that YouTube is TV is just continue to grow. But you're going to have holdouts.
- [10:19]
A
Sure, sure. Stepping back a little bit, you know the last with with streaming comes more data, more targeting capabilities. But like we said there's also been this huge interest in better metrics, alternative metrics, you know, with between new currencies and just ways to match audiences across platforms. Have we reached any kind of consensus in that market? Are brands happy with the streaming metrics that are available to them? Are they really confused?
- [10:45]
B
There's probably more confusion than happiness and, and just increasing the amount of available options doesn't solve for a lot of the problems. You got disconnect across systems, a lack of centralized buying, you know, caps not met by the buyer or by the seller, you know sellers over promising the audience they have to reach a certain niche. An advertiser just you know, because they want, they want to take it. They don't want to just send money away. So each advancement, each new product is, is nice in a, in a press cycle and maybe nice to one up your competitor because that's a very space with a lot of litigation as well happening. But the, to appease the advertisers anxiety. I, I, I don't think we're making much progress on that end.
- [11:29]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. So many, many of the moves are almost like negotiating through press release versus Actually like where the market is going.
- [11:37]
B
Sometimes if you go into the TV network or the streaming service, you don't, it's not always clear which partners they allow and don't allow. And that changes too like, like, like with the Paramount Nielsen issues. So those business issues that get in the way to make a, like a comprehensive measurement. Right.
- [11:53]
A
And then you see this, you see a push for I, I want, I want something else, I want alternatives. But then, oh wait, I don't know, I don't know if I'm comfortable with these numbers. This is not Nielsen, I don't know what this is.
- [12:02]
B
Well, they don't like it if the number is lower too. If you go to an all currency it says that you have less. The methodology sucks.
- [12:09]
A
Yeah. I want to ask you about something else you've written about. It's been a big topic somewhat still under the radar because of all the hype around generative AI. But this advancement in AI driven media buying slash optimization which is being pushed by Meta and Google and to a large extent. So a two part question is, are brands feeling okay with this leaving putting that media buying stuff in the hands of automated tools that they can't control. How's that going? And then when are we going to see this in television? If we do.
- [12:43]
B
Brands ready do put a lot of their money in automated systems they can't control. They've been doing that with all types of programmatic advertising for years. But the, the use of AI isn't necessarily new. That's been slapped on all sorts of products. Like eight years ago, rocket fuel, a DSP that doesn't exist anymore because it was absorbed into seismic which you know, blew up. You know, they touted their advanced AI capabilities at that time and so did many others and that didn't save them. And so you're going to see AI slapped on a lot of things that already existed. I mean God, just Google search the way they're using AI that you already had search that did basically the same thing. You know it's, it's like the Simpsons when they had the new Malibu Stacy and they just like changed the accessory slightly. That's what we're doing with a lot of AI. But if it catches on elsewhere it's going to come to TV if it hasn't already, even though those budgets are larger line items. But you know, if you just see how much programmatic has caught on and by TV I mean like you know, everything we're talking about not linear. I don't think AI is going to be Used to buy network TV spots, but just given the growth in programmatic CTV buy in, I would expect AI to come, but I don't know if that's going to make a whole lot of difference. And a lot of the things that'll be touted as AI are going to be existing products with a new name slapped on them.
- [14:08]
A
So you don't think there's a difference between like, I agree, like you could call all of ad tech AI and some to some extent a programmatic real time bidding. And some people do, but you know, you know, like with the products like Performance Max and others, that feels like a little bit more of a relinquishment of control. And do you, you don't think that's a huge difference? You think it's just like marketing or the. Or there it's, it is a fundamental shift in the way that media buying is going to work.
- [14:34]
B
I view it as marketing, but in general there has been more of a hands off approach. Like I mean you've just seen increase programmatic over time, you know, increase basically outsourcing of your ad sales to machines. So whether they would call this AI or something else, it's would just be the next step in automated ad buying in my view. But I'm sure there's like a huge AI booster who could tell me 10 reasons why I'm wrong.
- [15:02]
A
All right, I want to ask you about you. You, as we mentioned, you have a book coming out. Give us the title, the inspiration, why, where are you doing this? And then I want to get into some of the trends you've, you've uncovered and talked about.
- [15:14]
B
Yeah, sure thing. So the book is 1999, the year low culture conquered America and kickstarted our bizarre times. Why I'm doing it is because I loved all this trashy stuff in the 90s. I love Jerry Springer, Insane Clown Posse, pro wrestling from the attitude era, Beanie Babies, I liked it all. But I've noticed there's a lot of things in our culture now that kind of come from this stuff that was mocked back that, you know, Jerry Springer is rated as the worst TV show of all time. Now our, you know, national politics basically function like a Jerry Springer talk show segment.
- [15:45]
A
You make a fair point.
- [15:46]
B
So there's a lot of the, the most derided aspects of 90s culture are visible all around us all the time. And so I wanted to intellectualize that and put it in a place where I could put it out. And I guess I've just been inspired by the nuttiness of Our world over the last five years.
- [16:05]
A
You definitely have. All of a sudden there's a documentary boom. At least there's an overall documentary boom in streaming, but a lot of 90s themed. You mentioned there's a new Jerry Springer doc on Netflix. You had a big WWE one that, I mean, it wasn't just about the 90s, but cover that appeared a lot. Menendez brothers, other things.
- [16:24]
B
Beanie Babies was on Max.
- [16:25]
A
Like, yeah, is this just happening? Because it's been enough. Enough time has passed and it's the period, you know, while we were just nostalgic about the 80s a few years ago, now it's 90s. Or is there something that's connecting us to that time more or of more interest to Gen Z or something?
- [16:41]
B
So I would say the young Gen Xers and millennials are starting to come of the age where the pop culture, their youth is what they want to revisit. And that's like, you know, what brings them happiness. So all that stuff is getting rebooted. The same thing happened with 50s pop culture in the mid 70s and early 80s. Happy days Greece. Back to the future in the, in the 80s. So, you know, if, if you take stuff from the 50s and you go forward 25 years later, that's what you get. So, you know, we're. We're 25 years from the late 90s right now. And so the late 90s are what's fashionable because the people who are in charge of media companies and institutions are of that age now.
- [17:24]
A
You know what struck me? This is a little bit of a sub. I watched the WWE Mr. McMahon documentary, for example, and we tend to think that culture and taste has, like, it's always worse now. Like, oh, things have got. Things used to be, you know, like a lot more civilized and we're getting, we're degrading because of social. Because of whatever. And I was struck by how that attitude area talked about was so it was racy and pushed the envelope and I was on a regular.
- [17:51]
B
Awesome.
- [17:52]
A
I was older than I. I was more of an 80s wrestling fan. But I guess, do we, do we not realize how rough the culture was at times back then? And maybe we sanitize it. And what, and what has that done to us today where we are in media and taste?
- [18:07]
B
And yeah, the, the time you're living in is always perceived as the worst time as far as moral standards. There's always some sort of morally for reformer who says that, yeah, today's youth are the worst and their form of entertainment is the one that Needs to be put down. Like the 90s, it was video games need to be censored. You know, and before that you got rock and roll and radio and.
- [18:27]
A
Yeah, now this garbage, right?
- [18:28]
B
Yeah, exactly. Tick Tock is the new video games of the 90s. But so someone I, I was talking about the book recently with, with another host and they, they kind of put forth the same question to me. And what I said was that if you go back and read all the news articles and books that were coming out at the time from the 90s, which I had to do for this research, it didn't seem like this peaceful time where everything was great. The Internet at the time provoked probably more anxiety than it does now. You know, if you look at like all the hearings for the 1996 Telecommunications act and then what became of Section 230, the debates were fierce and there was just this fear that kids would consume anything on the Internet and it would turn them into these depraved sociopaths.
- [19:13]
A
You're going to get going to a chat room and get killed. And it was just like.
- [19:17]
B
So the culture then was seen as being trashy because Jerry Springer is on top and pro wrestling is on top. And Internet offered all these things that the people who are writing about it didn't understand. So they didn't seem it as like innocent days. We just see it as innocent days now. If we go forward 25 years, I think people our age now are gonna say they were scared of TikTok. That's crazy. And AI was. So we, you know, it was so in its early stage they were blown away by like these image generators, like.
- [19:47]
A
Right, right.
- [19:48]
B
And they wanted to, they wanted to have regulation on them. So the perception of innocence versus harm changes a lot over time. And we tend to look at the past with more rose colored glasses than the people who were writing about and covering the era at the time.
- [20:02]
A
Did anything really surprise you when you went back and, and were doing research for the book?
- [20:07]
B
Yeah, there's two things. So one was how much Beanie Babies contribute to the success of ebay. So when ebay had its IPO in 98, their, their, you know, S1 talks about the Beanie Baby resale market and how like that's a potential volatility to their business because it was over 10% of their revenues at the time.
- [20:28]
A
So I remember, I remember when the be it was, the promise was, you'll be able to buy this lamp that someone's throwing out. It was not cool. There was already a sophisticated reseller market For Beanie Babies, which is wild.
- [20:40]
B
Yeah. And then the other thing is, I was aware of like the moral panic that happened after the Columbine shooting were all sorts of mass entertainment, from the Matrix movies to Marilyn Manson albums to the Doom. Video games were blamed for the tragedy and there were attempts to censor them. I wasn't aware that there was an academic cottage industry that started within the five years after 99, which is when Columbine happened. The share of academic articles devoted to linking violent video games to real world violence increased dramatically. Like we're talking 5x in the period of just a few years. And that link wasn't as studied as much and the conclusions drawn from it weren't as politicized as the way they were afterwards. Because we think of academia, they're impartial, they're these high minded people who just put results above agenda. But that's not really the case. They are as prone to the same whims that the presses or that, you know, emotional individuals are. And that wasn't something that was as clear to me before I started researching.
- [21:45]
A
It because you fast forward to today and kids are young, kids are playing Fortnite, which is basically a game where you. That's a shooter, kill everybody to survive. And we like, we got over that to a certain extent. Did that just not take hold or we just. The culture shifted again back and forth.
- [22:00]
B
Well, there's always a new panic. So once, you know, we don't freak out over comic books. In the 50s there were congressional hearings to try to censor comic books. That seems crazy today.
- [22:10]
A
Now every movie is a comic book movie.
- [22:11]
B
Yeah, well, yeah. And you know, the, the calls to ban radio. You know, radio was blamed for all these illnesses. In the 30s, doctors would even write these op eds to the new York Times about the ills of radio because, you know, audio entertainment didn't foster the same type of learning capabilities that reading did for any of those who are listening to this. But what's happened is that games matured so the audience went from being young to being old. Average gamer is now in their mid-30s. Back in the 90s, it was in the early 20s because it was a hobbyist pursuit. Once you had PlayStation 1, you had the first console to go over 100 million. It's now the most mainstream entertainment that there is. Like, it's just big intellectual property like.
- [22:49]
A
Mario in the movie business. Even though we don't, we don't talk about it the same way.
- [22:52]
B
Bigger than movies and music and books combined, Video game revenues exceed them all. So now that the people who grew up with games are adults, the panic goes to the next thing. So video games do get blamed in some quarters, but they don't take the heat that they did in the 90s. TikTok takes that heat. Right.
- [23:07]
A
Yeah, that's going to be. Well, we're days away from a decision there and whether that's going to be saved or not. But it's gonna, there'll be something else like it that will come along. It'll be interesting to see.
- [23:15]
B
Yeah. In 20 years. Tick, you know what? Tick tock and AI, that's another thing that people panic over. Those will be normalized and there'll be a new form of technology, communication that is used primarily by young people. That's going to provoke a lot of anxiety and that will be the panic of that era.
- [23:32]
A
One, one last thing, bringing it back to just 2025. You've been writing a lot about predictions about the ad business. What are there a couple of things you are really looking forward to that are would be bellwethers or where the, where the market's going or things that you want to, you want to talk about that are, that are big issues we should focus on.
- [23:47]
B
So Netflix has done a lot of experimentation with sports. Like, you know, they have two NFL games here, they have a fight here, they have a golf tournament here. WWE Raw is their first like really recurring sports.
- [24:01]
A
Like Live Weekly.
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B
Live Weekly. Yes. I'm expecting, I don't know if it's going to be this year. At some point, Netflix is going to dip their toes in the water and get a big sports right contract. Like, you know, like something like what Amazon's done, for instance. Most of the big leagues in the US have their rights locked up.
- [24:22]
A
Yeah, the NBA just made their big deal.
- [24:23]
B
Right. Yeah. And NFL isn't due for a while and MLBs even after that. But you have, you have, you know, individual college conferences, you have international sports. They are going to get a bigger live sports package and that's going to change how sports rights get bidded on. So, you know, the value they bring won't just be the revenue that they're, they're paying for the rights. You know, the sports leagues are going to start looking at how do we expand among young viewers who aren't watching sports at the same rate as older viewers. We don't want to lose, you know, Gen Z.
- [24:54]
A
They're on Netflix all the time.
- [24:55]
B
Yeah, exactly. So you saw that with NBA. Like the NBA preferred Amazon clearly over Warner. The matching wasn't just about the dollar amount. It was like about the promotion that Amazon could give it in the rest of its portfolio. Exactly. So Netflix is a lot bigger than Prime Video, especially in terms of watch time. So when Netflix finally does make a big splash into sports, that's like, you know, it's, that's done for layer tv. Their upper hand is, I mean, there'll still be a lot of sports on linear tv, but they're the upper hand of being the top party that you go to in those negotiations will wither. And so that's what I'm, I'm looking at and I expect to happen within the next year.
- [25:37]
A
I'll be interested. On that note to see, I know YouTube NFL Sunday Ticket, but I was actually surprised they didn't get on the NBA rights because they could theoretically have the same kind of impact if they got a big sports rights deal to push it out to that huge audience. I'm watching them quietly as well, maybe even more so.
- [25:52]
B
I mean, YouTube is really, really huge all around the world. You know, it's like with Sunday Ticket, you can, they have different packages. You can get like whether you're with YouTube TV or not, but you kind of are paying a la carte, which is a little different than, you know, like Netflix just rolls raw right into your existing subscription.
- [26:12]
A
It's on the menu.
- [26:13]
B
Thursday Night Football's on the homepage when you log in. If YouTube did that and put it for free, oh, my God, the viewership would be crazy. It would be. It'd be hard to make that revenue back. And advertising alone, though, because you'd have to pay such an astronomical amount to get those games exclusive.
- [26:29]
A
All right, Ross, great stuff. Thanks for taking time out. Where should people find the book? Amazon, I'm assuming.
- [26:34]
B
Go to bookshop.org or straight to the publisher's website, University Press of Kansas. Bezos doesn't need any more money.
- [26:41]
A
Yeah, he's doing all right. All right, great conversation. Let's do this again. Thanks a lot.
- [26:45]
B
Thanks, Mike.
- [26:46]
A
A big thanks to my guest this week, emarkers Rosh Banish and my partners at Epsilon. If you like this week's episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to bring you, so please hit that subscribe button. We'll see you next time for more what's next in media. Thanks for listening.