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YouTube Premium hits a subscription landmark: The service now enjoys 100 million subscribers after YouTube spent much of 2023 cracking down on ad blockers.

Amazon Prime Video ads launched today, defaulting Amazon鈥檚 163.3 million US viewers into its ad-supported tier unless they pay a premium to opt out. This is good news for Amazon鈥檚 $44.26 billion dollar retail US media business. But who could this move hurt?

Prime Video gets its first major advertising partner: IPG Mediabrands will get first-look access to new ad formats when Prime Video debuts ads in 2024.

Connected TV (CTV) ad spend will exceed $30 billion in the US next year, according to our forecast. At a growth rate of 22.4% YoY, that makes CTV one of the fastest-growing ad formats we track. But where those ad dollars are coming from isn鈥檛 so simple.

Netflix hits 238 million members in Q2 after account-sharing purge: The streaming service saw revenues rise 2.7% despite a quarter of ups and downs.

US linear TV ad spend is shrinking (8.0% YoY) as connected TV (CTV) ad spend grows (21.2% YoY). This year, US CTV ad spend will total $25.09 billion while linear will total $61.31 billion.

While the platform鈥檚 ad-supported tier gains momentum, Netflix needs to beef up its targeting capabilities to win advertisers over. Meanwhile, viewers may be turned off by a heavy ad load and a crackdown on password sharing. But global growth shows promise for Netflix鈥檚 future.

鈥淚 think it鈥檚 kind of a hard sell,鈥� said our analyst Daniel Konstantinovic of Netflix鈥檚 Basic with Ads tier. Existing Netflix users are used to ad-free content, and even a cheaper price won鈥檛 win most of them over, he said. Could a potential recession change that?

Subscription OTT video is chasing linear TV in terms of time spent in the US. We estimate adults still spend significantly more time per day watching TV, but that figure is decreasing and will fall below 3 hours this year. Meanwhile, for subscription OTT video, time spent will surpass an hour and a half per day. But ad spend on these platforms is not proportional to time spent.

The way people watch TV is changing. So are the ways brands advertise on TV. Connected TV has seen 鈥渕onumental progress in just a handful of years,鈥� said our analyst Ross Benes. But that鈥檚 not the full story. Here are key TV behaviors and ad trends to watch in the new year.

The sports rights spending of subscription OTT services will increase by more than $3 billion this year to reach $8.5 billion worldwide, according to Ampere Analysis. Their monthly viewership will also grow, per our forecast, surpassing 2 billion for the first time in 2023.

I think that's just going to be the real big focus for Netflix is getting as many users as they can to sign up for the ad supported tier, whether that's by increasing the gap between ad free and ad-supported video to get people to opt for the cheaper tier or doing things like password sharing to get them to sign up. Marcus Johnson:. Yeah. Daniel Konstantinovic:.

So, you're going to have your NFL, your OTT in general, you're going to have your Prime Video, and you're going to have your Freevee, and your FAST Channels, so all of those people are basically contributing to this CTV portion or drawing from that CTV portion. So, that's basically how I look at it. It's all about retail media.

I mean, they are the biggest player among fast channels, and I wouldn't say they created the category, but they definitely supercharged it.

I am speaking with Ethan and Paul Briggs, our Canadian principal analyst, and we're going to be talking a little bit more about one of the issues that we touched upon today, the fast or free ad supported streaming TV platforms around the world. Marcus Johnson:. Very nice. They'll see you then. Happy weekends.

Building their own businesses is a good example, but some of them are also going off and creating their own media networks or branching out into things like podcasting or even fast channels. And that is reshaping the way that entertainment is being provided and consumed. Marcus Johnson:. I thought that was fascinating.

Something else that's also interesting to watch is that because there are so many subscription video on demand players and the costs of these services keep rising outside of bundle offerings and ad supported tiers, something that is seeing significant growth are free ad supported streaming options. Things like Tubi have been doing very well. Roku has been doing well.

We've got the legacy ones moving over to ad supported video on demand or ad tiers, et cetera. This is changing, but it's still nowhere close and marketers and advertisers have not caught up. Some of that's because of the lack of inventory. Some of that is because of pricing issues.

These so-called fast channels, where it's all you need is an internet connection and you can watch TV as long as you can accept the ads that are part and parcel with it. So I think that is a factor that's at play as well. But across all the subscription video on demand players, ad-supported tiers are now commonplace. So I think that is something that will be evident for many, many years.