Tubi’s Super Bowl viewership highlights brands’ embrace of FAST channels

Anjali Sud, CEO of Tubi, referred to the moment as a “major milestone for free ad-supported television,” adding that it was “a full circle moment as we achieve new levels of scale and cultural resonance with viewers.”

It’s also likely to be a milestone for advertisers. Media buyers say FAST channels are taking up a growing portion of the ad dollars flowing toward CTV, propelled by growing audiences drawn to providers like Tubi and Roku for their sports content. Other ad supported streamers such as FuboTV are picking up their fair share, too.

“Last year’s Oscars had 19.5 million [viewers]. The Grammys a week ago had 15.4 million (just linear),” Harry Browne, vp of TV, audio and display innovation at media agency Tinuiti, told Digiday in an email. “FAST TV essentially had its own major cultural event even with most eyes still on the linear feed.”

While most of the ads shown on Tubi’s Super Bowl coverage were pass-through commercials — that is, ads booked to run on Fox, but shown on both channels simultaneously — the platform did manage to sell a number of shorter streaming-only spots. Combined ad sales reached $800 million, according to a Fox statement released Thursday (Feb. 13).

In addition to the standard 30- and 60-second ad units sold against Super Bowl coverage, Fox made a limited supply of 15-second, streaming-only ad units on Tubi available to advertisers the week before the Big Game. It’s unclear how streaming-only spots were sold in the end, but Fox considers Tubi an increasingly important driver of revenue. Its second quarter financial results (released this week) credited the service with helping to drive an ad revenue increase of $308 million, a 19% year on year increase.

FAST growth

FAST channels account for much of the growth in CTV spending among Tinuiti clients, said Browne. Ad spend growth “has been most substantial on FAST networks,” he said, noting that “growth primarily accelerated on FAST in the middle of 2024, when audience numbers on the FAST networks really took off.” (Tubi, for example, saw millions of monthly active users climb from 74 million to 97 million between September 2023 and January 2025, a 24% rise.)

Average weekly investment in FAST channels for Tinuiti clients is now double what it was in Q2 2024, Browne added, but he declined to elaborate on actual dollar amounts. He said that FAST investment was becoming an automatic add to media plans for “most” of the agency’s advertisers spending on linear TV, while streaming-only strategies also include the channel.

Similarly, Mike Treon, video and connected TV strategy lead at media agency PMG, explained that CTV is the fastest-growing type of media, by client spending. The agency’s clients invested roughly $200 million in CTV in 2024, he estimated. Within that broader category, Treon estimated that 25% had gone to FAST channels, a proportion he said was expected to rise.

The Super Bowl provides a “halo effect” for platforms and broadcasters, noted Chris Ross, vp and analyst at Gartner for Marketers. But it’s just the latest milestone in advertisers’ embrace of FAST, and connected TV in general.

In 2024, Peacock’s Olympics coverage and Netflix’s NFL streams both proved that streaming platforms were viable routes to sports audiences, and following Tubi’s hiccup-free Super Bowl, 2025 offers more opportunities for platforms to prove their chops, with Disney set to stream the Academy Awards on Hulu for the first time this year, alongside its coverage on ABC.

Hitch-free live programming aside, for advertisers, scale is the real argument in favor of investment.

Roku and Tubi boast comparable audiences to the streaming platforms backed by big tech, such as Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV (Tubi claims 97 million monthly active users, Roku 90 million; Amazon’s ad tier has some 104 million users, per an eMarketer estimate).

And they’re soaking up almost a third of the users picking up streaming services. According to a Kantar study released on Feb. 13, 27% of new video-on-demand users opted for either FAST services or virtual multichannel video programming distributor (vMVPD) platforms like Fubo, while 35% chose paid ad-supported services like those offered by Disney. The proportion of Americans regularly using FAST services rose from 10% in 2018, to 33% in 2024, per eMarketer estimates.

“The biggest driver [of ad spend] has been the audience growth,” said Browne. He credited sports content, including Roku’s Sunday MLB coverage, and the attractiveness of the services to cordless “younger, more diverse audiences, meaning that a wider variety of advertisers can successfully use FAST networks to access their target demographics.”

The broader CTV space

Tubi itself clearly considered the Big Game an ambition fulfilled. “Now we have the confidence that we can honestly do anything after streaming the biggest media event in the U.S.,” Tubi CMO Nicole Parlapiano told Digiday this week.

It’s not the only free to air streamer vying for rising advertising dollars, though. Fubo TV, a vMVPD which also carried Fox’s Super Bowl telecast, is among those hoping to increase share going forward. The service markets itself as a sports-first service to users, and Dina Roman, svp global ad sales and operations, Fubo TV, told Digiday that “sports has become the new must-see TV.” 

Roman told Digiday that the company had increased ad revenue by 40% year-on-year during the 2024-2025 upfronts season, and that 40% of its advertisers were new clients. The majority of those, she claimed, were “blue chip” advertisers that typically spent significant amounts on linear in the past.

“These are brands that have been around for a long time, and so they’re migrating to streaming,” she said. Roman declined to share specific financial details, citing the firm’s upcoming earnings report expected March 7.

Despite its planned merge with Hulu Live TV, Roman said Fubo will continue to develop new ad products and formats unabated. On Feb. 10, it announced an expansion of its Fubo Sports network to include over-the-air (OTA) stations in 100 markets nationwide. She also said it had launched banner ads and branded “skins” for content carousels on its user home screen, as well as pause ads, within the last six months.

Advertisers know that live sporting events are one of the few means of reaching large audiences in a “well-lit” brand safe environment.

As the Super Bowl recedes from view, its legacy for advertisers will likely be an increased willingness to follow viewers to CTV channels, particularly FAST and vMPVD providers.

As PMG’s Treon summed up: “The audience is going there, and that’s where the dollars need to flow.”