D+ Research: Marketers navigate a changing CTV landscape

YouTube came out on top for the fourth year in a row as the ad-supported streaming service that received the largest portion of both survey respondents’ ad placements and ad budgets. Seventy-five percent of brand and agency respondents said they currently place ads on YouTube as of Q1 2026. Amazon’s Prime Video (with ads) followed in second place at 47% of respondents, while Hulu and Paramount+ tied in third place at 43% of respondents, respectively.

The top three ad-supported streaming platforms that consumed the greatest portion of marketers’ budgets in 2025 aligned with the top platforms where they place ads, Digiday’s survey found. Half of respondents (50%) said YouTube consumed the largest portion of their company’s ad budget in 2025. Amazon’s Prime Video (with ads) and Hulu followed in second and third place at 18% and 8% of respondents, respectively. 

While the top CTV platforms remained the same in this year’s ranking as last year’s, the streaming industry is poised to experience significant shifts in the coming 12 months, which will likely affect next year’s ranking. 

The Walt Disney Company is planning to merge Hulu with Disney+ by the end of 2026. Paramount also plans to combine Paramount+ and Max into a single streaming service in the coming year, pending regulatory approval of Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Harry Browne, vp of TV, audio and display innovation at performance marketing agency Tinuiti, said the mergers are expected to make audience targeting easier for marketers. “Targeting is an exercise in figuring out which platforms consumers might be on, reaching them on those platforms and using different signals to reach them in the right place. There’s hope that if we consolidate platforms, that exercise becomes easier.”

“One of the partners that’s been really effective in this fragmented space is somebody like a Roku or an OEM, or an operating system, because they have this opportunity to reach people on several different streaming platforms regardless of which one they’re watching,” he added. “This consolidation helps other individual streaming platforms compete a little bit better with that kind of an argument.”

However, Brian Albert, YouTube’s managing director of U.S. video deals and creative works, is cautious about the mergers. “The most immediate effect on viewers will be going from ‘too many apps’ to ‘the mega bundle,’ essentially creating a landscape that looks like the old cable TV model,” he said in an email.

Measurement and cost continue to frustrate marketers

This year, advertisers found lack of measurement, cost of media and lack of budget to be top challenges they face across ad-supported streaming platforms. Lack of measurement and lack of budget were top concerns for marketers last year as well.

As more streaming services have introduced ad-supported tiers, the market has become increasingly fragmented. Along with fragmentation, CTV publishers and streaming services often act as walled gardens, using encryption tools and limiting audience data sharing, which can make measurement more complex. 

However, the pending mergers between Disney+ and Hulu and Paramount+ and Max may make it easier for marketers to measure across platforms, as data is shared between companies. NBCUniversal’s evp, streaming, performance sales and partnerships Kristina Shepard said in an email that platform partnerships with retail media networks are helping as well.

“The industry is moving toward smaller, higher-quality, more actionable datasets that improve modeling and lead to better business decisions,” Shepard said. “Across the industry, we see progress being driven by stronger data collaboration and strategic partnerships, like those with retail media networks, that are enabling more closed-loop attribution with clearer links between media exposure and real business outcomes.”

Walmart+ members, for example, receive a streaming benefit that allows them to choose between free access to Paramount+ or Peacock.

Tinuiti’s Browne said measurement has improved industry-wide over the past year. The agency recently partnered with Netflix to test its conversion API (CAPI) tools and has worked with Amazon and Google on their clean room solutions. 

“We have seen a lot of focus on ways to bring deterministic results to environments that didn’t used to have them,” Browne said. “… We’ve seen a lot of these traditional black box, walled garden environments become more open to the idea of deterministic measurement that can follow a user all the way down to a purchase or revenue event.”

With competition fierce among streaming platforms and a range of platforms available to them, advertisers also have been able to exert significant pressure on streamers to lower CPMs. That’s despite the cost of media remaining a top concern for marketers across platforms, according to Digiday’s survey results. 

Tinuiti’s Browne said the pending platform mergers are likely to stabilize CPMs, which have fluctuated recently. “My expectation is that we’re going to see a bottoming out of the CPM trends that we’ve seen over the last couple of years,” he said. “The streaming space at large has become so fractured… Now there are 11 or 12 major ad-supported streaming platforms eating up a lot of time. All of that has led to a downward pressure on CPMs, which has been a huge benefit to advertisers. My expectation is that this kind of consolidation helps bottom out that pressure and starts to stabilize CPMs.”

YouTube’s Albert said marketers’ future focus will shift from paying lower ad prices to ensuring ad spend drives business results. “Looking ahead, the efficiency of the spend will become more important than the raw cost of the impression. Marketers will want to know that every dollar spent is optimizing for actual business lift rather than just a rising market rate.”

Some streaming platforms pose their own unique challenges for advertisers. Brand safety, for example, is a concern for marketers on YouTube because of its user-generated content. Seventeen percent of survey respondents said brand safety is their biggest concern on YouTube. 

Lack of transparency into content is a concern for marketers on Disney+ (with ads), Hulu, Prime Video (with ads) and The Roku Channel. Nineteen percent of respondents said lack of transparency into content was their biggest concern on both Disney+ (with ads) and Hulu, while 17% and 15% of respondents said it was their top concern on The Roku Channel and Prime Video (with ads), respectively.

Browne said lack of transparency is not always tied to brand safety concerns. “As advertisers become more full funnel, they are starting to think about content alignment from a brand acceleration perspective,” he said. “It’s not so much a brand safety issue in CTV because most advertisers consider CTV brand safe, but there is definitely consideration toward ‘is there going to be a synergistic and positive effect of this kind of content with my brand?’ If I air on Netflix, does that give a level of prestige to my brand that I wouldn’t get if I aired on a smaller, cheaper network?”

Lauren Sherman-Kaoud, chief marketing and creative officer at Ruggable, said CTV advertising typically builds brand trust because ads appearing alongside premium video content gives brands credibility. “CTV and linear in general are incredible brand trust interest mechanisms,” Sherman-Kaoud said. “Inherently, when you’re watching a show, whether it be streaming or not, and a brand pops up, it is still meaningful to the consumer that the brand is showing up in that larger format. That will forever be true.”