Campaigns are in survival mode right now. Build the operation. Win the primary. Raise cash for November.
60%+ of campaign budgets go to paid media, and a growing percentage is going to streaming. As plans are built, campaigns need to understand what inventory delivers real reach to voters.
Back in Impressions to Ballots #3, we compared Nielsen Gauge data for the general market to what’s actually available to political advertisers.
Once you remove:
Ad-free subscription apps
Platforms that don’t accept political ads
The allocation of time spent watching the TV screen that is available to political advertisers changes meaningfully.
For political buyers, streaming breaks down into three very different categories:
YouTube (CTV) - 38% of time spent- YouTube ads delivered on the big screen (not including YouTubeTV). Massive scale that most campaigns must include. No audience targeting drives higher eCPMs.
Premium AVOD - 23% - Discovery+, Disney, HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock. Sky-high CPMs, limited supply, strong perception value, but not enough scale on their own. Hard for political buyers to work with.
Other - 39% - Roku Channel, Tubi, Pluto, and hundreds of other apps. Audience-targeted, can go live fast, and optimized in near real time. Fragmented, but the foundation of political streaming plans.
Note: We removed Pluto, Paramount-owned FAST service, from Premium and moved it to Other.
When you break “Other” down by app, you see the extreme fragmentation of streaming.
Hundreds of long-tail apps account for 19% of time spent. There is a real reach opportunity here.
Let's Take a Deeper Look at “Other”
This bucket is made up of three main groups:
FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV) - 126M Viewers
Free, linear-style channels inside streaming apps or TV operating systems
Reruns, movies, niche programming
Older audiences, lean-back viewing
Examples: Roku Channel, Tubi, Pluto TV, Xumo
vMVPDs - 20M Subscribers
Internet-delivered cable bundles
Live news and sports
Cable-like viewing without the box
Examples: Sling, DirecTV Stream, Fubo, YouTube TV
Network-specific apps - Ad Hoc viewers
Cable networks streaming directly (Fox News, CNN, MSNBC)
Local broadcast groups streaming news (Scripps, Tegna, Gray)
More to come on vMVPDs next week, let’s dig into the other components.
What is the opportunity for political buyers?
Layer in app-specific viewing across the broader long tail, and the scale becomes clear. This is where campaigns can find audience-targeted impressions, strong viewability, and the ability to optimize performance daily.
Yes, there is junk here:
Resellers
Low-quality apps
Fraud
But streaming only performs poorly when buyers are lazy.
Disciplined buying turns this inventory into a powerful reach engine. Quality long-tail supply delivers real coverage at a fraction of the cost of Premium AVOD and often at lower eCPMs than YouTube.
How should campaigns approach long-tail buying?
Whitelist quality publishers - Roku Channel, Tubi, Pluto TV, Xumo
Demand app-level transparency - Your buyer must be able to tell you where impressions ran.
Cut aggressively - Anything that doesn’t perform gets blacklisted.
Treat FAST like a reach product - Scale first. Optimize continuously.
Streaming works when buyers control it. It fails when they outsource judgment.
What does this mean for political advertisers?
Waterfall inventory by eCPM and reach - Long-tail streaming should be the cornerstone of targeted plans, with YouTube added to drive broad reach.
Campaigns should expect quality buying - control the inventory, optimize constantly, and use it to deliver scalable, cost-efficient coverage that premium supply alone can’t provide.
Align allocation to campaign phase - As audiences expand from primary persuasion to general election GOTV, eCPMs shift and budgets should rebalance to maximize reach at each stage.