Digiday+ Research: The marketers’ 2026 guide to a shifting CTV landscape, including YouTube, Peacock and Roku

As CTV matures, the streaming ad industry is entering a period of change. Media giants like The Walt Disney Company and Paramount are pursuing mergers that have the potential to reduce market fragmentation and strengthen scale. At the same time, advertisers are reevaluating how they measure success across streaming platforms as performance expectations rise and audience viewing habits shift. Industry-wide, brands and platforms are experimenting with how to best implement AI in CTV.

Digiday+ Research’s fifth annual report analyzes the state of ad-supported streaming and the challenges those companies pose to marketers.

To map out marketers’ current digital playbook, Digiday+ Research distributed three surveys asking 125 respondents a range of questions, including past and upcoming investments, marketing channel tactics and business challenges.

Digiday+ Research also conducted interviews with the marketing and streaming executives from the following companies:

• Milani Cosmetics
• NBCUniversal (Peacock)
• Rembrand
• Roku
• Ruggable
• Tinuiti
• YouTube

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.

Marketers surveyed by Digiday+ Research in the first quarter of this year mainly used impressions and watch times as the two main metrics to measure ad campaign success across all ad-supported streaming platforms.

On top-used platform YouTube, 46% marketers selected watch time as their main metric of success. That was the largest percentage of respondents who selected watch time on any platform in Digiday’s survey.

Watch time matters to marketers on other platforms as well because advertisers hope to prompt engaged viewers into taking actions like making purchases via a TV remote control or clicking to learn more about a product. The metric also shows ad buyers which impressions are making an impact with viewers or causing action.

“The view-through element is really critical,” Tinuiti’s Browne said. “If I [as a consumer], watch a Netflix ad at 8 p.m. and at 7 a.m. the next day go on the website of the company whose ad I saw, add something to my cart and make a purchase, that kind of deterministic link is something that clean room solutions have been effective at measuring. Because the rate at which someone clicks through an ad on CTV, especially if it’s airing on a screen, as opposed to a laptop, is still low.”

YouTube’s Albert noted that the platform is integrated into Google’s ecosystem so marketers can look at search lift and brand interest. Albert suggested marketers take advantage of media across the funnel — and consider collaborating with creators on custom content.

YouTube differs significantly from the other streaming platforms due to its audience size. According to Nielsen’s The Gauge report from February 2026, YouTube took the second spot among its streaming peers for total TV usage, trailing only the combined share of NBCUniversal, which owns Peacock, and Versant.

YouTube is also increasingly functioning like a mainstream TV network on connected televisions, according to Hermelinda Fernandez, svp, digital investment at Canvas Worldwide. “YouTube dominates video and the biggest thing that’s changing right now is the way content is changing,” Fernandez said.

Marketers said they use impressions more than any other metric to gauge ad campaign success on Peacock (at 50%), Max (at 47%), Disney+ (43%, with ads) and Paramount+ (42%).

Tracking impressions helps advertisers understand the scale of an ad’s exposure and can be key for raising brand awareness. Platforms are eager to offer impressions data as proof of scale as they seek to grow their streaming businesses and to draw advertisers away from traditional TV.

Marketers chose click-through rates as a top success metric on Netflix Standard (with ads) and Amazon’s Prime Video (with ads) more than on other platforms. Twenty-six percent of marketers said click-through rates were their main measurement of success on Netflix Standard (with ads), while 18% said the same of Prime Video (with ads). 

Prime Video (with ads) has an advantage over other ad-supported streaming platforms, in that consumers don’t have to click away from Amazon’s site to visit an external brand site to complete a purchase. 

Kristina Shepard, evp, streaming, performance sales and partnerships at NBCUniversal, explained in an email that advertisers want streaming ads to produce tangible results. “Impressions and watch time are important, but in today’s streaming marketplace, brands are focused on what’s next, building relationships with audiences and driving measurable business outcomes,” Shepard said. “The value isn’t just in reaching audiences, but in reaching them in premium environments where content, advertising and consumer attention work together to deliver meaningful results for brands of all sizes.”

Jeremy Lowenstein, chief marketing officer at Milani Cosmetics, said, with so many streaming platforms, marketers need to consider KPIs in the context of the programming that surrounds ads and where viewers are watching.

“There are so many networks now. What shows do you attach yourself to? Is there a call to action? It all comes back to setting yourself up with the right scorecard for what you are measuring,” Milani said. “CTV isn’t about immediate conversion. You should be looking at it through the lens of a CPM, a view-through rate or a click-through rate, depending on what screen consumers are watching on… If everything is measured on ROAS, you’re in for failure. It’s about being honest with yourself about that.”

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 Shepard said 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,” NBCUniversal’s Shepard said in an email. “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, chief marketing 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 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.”

Marketers are increasingly using AI to support work functions, from text and image creation to data analytics, consumer targeting and engagement. However, when Digiday asked marketers whether they are using AI in their CTV campaigns, the majority of survey respondents (82%) said they are not using AI for marketing in streaming.

That’s a stark contrast to other channels like social media, for example, where 51% percent of marketers told Digiday they were using AI for marketing. 

“AI adoption in CTV has historically lagged because TV was built on a broadcast mindset, whereas social media was built on data,” YouTube’s Albert explained. 

“CTV is often slower to adopt technologies as a general rule,” Browne said. “But AI is starting to creep into the CTV space in a lot of different places. First and foremost, audience targeting … as well as contextual targeting to understand the context that is airing and whether that’s where an advertiser wants to place their ad.” 

In December 2025, NBCUniversal launched its AI-powered ad tools, Contextual Targeting Live and Live Total Impact to enable relevant ad placement during live sports and events. “We see AI as a tool to make premium video more intelligent, efficient and accountable. It allows us to help our partners connect their messages with our storytelling to measurable outcomes with greater speed, precision and scale,” Shepard said in an email. “It is especially powerful in CTV because it brings together premium content, rich data signals and real-time optimization in one environment.”

Cory Treffiletti, chief marketing officer of AI-driven ad tech company Rembrand, said the ease of integrating AI into CTV advertising depends on where in the tech stack it’s being applied. “For example, with interruptive ad formats, the barriers are structural and include fragmented identity resolution and siloed measurement,” Treffiletti said in an email. “These are not as big an issue in social, which tends to be ‘all-in’ and available within a single walled garden.”

Among the 18% of marketers who said they are using AI in their CTV marketing campaigns, the majority (69%) said they use AI to analyze data. More than half (54%) said they use AI to create content and buy ad placements, respectively. 

Roku has embedded AI in its ad tech stack and the platform partners with AI companies on creative production, particularly within its Ads Manager platform — primarily used by smaller DTC or local brands. “Before, entrance into TV was prohibitive because brands needed either to be in the upfront or to have a fully produced TV creative. So, that’s helped democratize access to advertising on CTV,” said Sarah Harms, Roku’s vp of ad marketing and measurement. “On the other hand, there’s a lot of bad AI content out there, and we haven’t really seen that infiltrate CTV like it has in the social platforms. … That’s not to say AI content or ads cannot be premium. We just have great control over it for now.”

Real-world applications of AI for CTV campaigns continue to grow. In April 2026, a group of AI researchers, including several Netflix employees, debuted an AI tool called VOID that can be used to remove objects from video clips, detect and understand the relationships between objects in a scene and alter the video altogether. 

The team behind VOID wrote in a research paper about the tool, “Void [sic] does not just recall simple visual cues from its training data, but applies high-level reasoning and world knowledge from the VLM [vision-language model] and underlying video diffusion model to video editing. As such, it is likely to benefit as more capable generative models become available.”

Nevertheless, Browne said it will take time before AI is regularly used in CTV campaigns. “CTV is the type of creative that advertisers are most precious about. They have the most pride in what they put on the biggest screen in the house,” he said. “There is hesitancy to turn that over to an AI creative technology, where if something looks a little bit off, it could make the whole creative fall apart.”

Browne said AdCP is one of the more interesting places where AI is being incorporated into CTV to automate media buying. “The ways that we can replace some of the existing DSP, SSP infrastructure with [AI] agents that can talk to each other and operate a lot faster. That has a lot of potential value for agencies, but that could also have a benefit for advertisers,” he said. “The more time and work that is saved, the more cost savings can be passed on to advertisers, and the more effective their campaigns can be.”

“AI is not going away at this point,” Treffiletti said. “The difference is that companies are viewing AI as a tool to fix existing processes and problems, while reinventing how they operate. … AI is being used to speed up data access and to build bridges between data sources, helping advertisers better understand the outcomes of the budgets they spend. …. That is why it is becoming such an essential tool.”