US CTV ad spend to hit $36.95 billion by 2026

The massive scale of the American market provides the primary infrastructure for streaming monetization, but the rapid acceleration in India and Brazil indicates that the next phase of growth lies in non-English speaking territories. As these emerging markets mature, global advertisers must balance the high reach of the US with the untapped runway of regions where year-over-year growth is nearly double the American rate. This shift forces a transition from US-centric strategies to complex multi-market campaigns that account for localized cultural norms and fragmented measurement standards. Watch for whether Brazil’s projected 106.3% growth through 2030 triggers a significant reallocation of global programmatic budgets away from saturated Western markets.

The CTV advertising ecosystem is consolidating around a handful of major platforms and measurement providers as spend scales. In early 2025, Amazon Ads reported that its streaming TV ads reached over 150 million monthly viewers across its portfolio, a figure that underscores how concentrated CTV inventory has become among the largest ad-supported streamers. Meanwhile, Disney announced in May 2025 that its ad-supported streaming tier had surpassed 100 million monthly active users globally, giving advertisers a scaled alternative to Amazon's ecosystem. These two platforms alone now command a significant share of the US CTV ad budget that eMarketer forecasts at $36.95 billion, and their dominance is reshaping how agencies plan and buy connected television.

On the business and measurement side, the industry is grappling with fragmentation that complicates budget allocation. The IAB released updated CTV measurement guidelines in March 2025 that recommend cross-platform deduplication standards for advertisers buying across multiple streaming services, addressing a long-standing complaint from brands that overlapping audiences inflate reported reach. Separately, Nielsen and Comscore announced a joint initiative in April 2025 to harmonize CTV audience metrics across linear and streaming environments, a move that could reduce the friction advertisers face when comparing CTV performance against traditional TV buys. These measurement developments directly affect whether the projected growth in emerging markets like India and Brazil can attract programmatic dollars at scale, since advertisers typically require standardized currency before committing significant budgets.

Technically, the infrastructure supporting CTV ad delivery is evolving to handle the volume eMarketer projects. Innovid reported in its Q1 2025 earnings that ad decisioning volume on its platform grew 38% year over year, driven by increased programmatic CTV buying, reflecting the operational demands of serving billions of ad impressions across fragmented device environments. FreeWheel, a Comcast subsidiary, disclosed in February 2025 that it had processed over 1 trillion ad decisions in the trailing twelve months, a milestone that illustrates the scale of server-side ad insertion required to support the US market alone. As emerging markets scale their CTV ecosystems, similar infrastructure investments will be necessary to support the growth rates eMarketer projects for India, Brazil, and Spain.