Magnite Study Says YouTube Is Still Not TV, Especially When It Comes To Ad Performance
For years, marketers have given their hearts (and their ad dollars) to video-sharing platforms like YouTube because they’re easy. The audience is massive, the targeting is familiar, the charts bright and colorful and the buying process simple. But just because something is easy doesn’t mean it’s necessarily effective, as Magnite’s new report, Why Streaming TV Is a Must-Buy, makes abundantly clear. The report offers evidence that when it comes to ad performance, streaming TV is just better.
The problem? Too many advertisers still lump streaming and video-sharing platforms together, treating them as an interchangeable mass called “digital video.”
And as we have been preaching for most of this decade, they are decidedly not interchangeable and brands that fail to recognize the difference are doing themselves no favors.
The Audience Has Already Made Its Choice
As per the report, there are now 254 million streaming TV viewers in the U.S., and 240 million of them watch ad-supported content.
That’s a huge number, but what matters is the report shows they’re watching differently than video-sharing platform users.
84% of streaming viewers watch daily
80% spend more than two hours a day with ad-supported content
Smart TVs are their dominant viewing device, while video-sharing platform users gravitate toward smaller screens like smartphones
Why does this matter? Because viewing behavior drives ad effectiveness, and when people sit down to watch streaming TV, they’re engaging with content very differently than when they’re scrolling through video-sharing platforms.
A Premium Environment Means Better Ad Performance
Magnite’s study, conducted with MediaScience, compared ad performance on streaming TV to ads on video-sharing platforms. The results reveal a sizable gap:
Ads on streaming TV had 11% higher brand recognition
Viewers were 13% more likely to see streaming TV ads as high quality
They were also 29% less likely to associate streaming TV ads with fake products
That last point is critical. Trust matters, especially in a time when misinformation and questionable content are all over digital platforms. When a brand runs an ad in a high-quality, professionally produced streaming show, it benefits from the credibility of that environment in a way that user-generated content simply can’t provide.
Meaning that in this instance, context matters.
More Trust, More Recall, More Action
Streaming TV ads aren’t just more memorable—they also drive results. Magnite’s report found that 60% of streaming TV viewers said they were likely to make a purchase after seeing an ad, while nearly half said they’d recommend the brand to someone else.
Repetition helps here too. The study found that when audiences saw an ad more than once on streaming TV, brand recognition increased by 11%. That’s the kind of reinforcement advertisers are looking for, and it’s happening in a space where viewers are already engaged.
Advertisers Need to Stop Treating Streaming Like Just Another Digital Buy
For too long, streaming TV and video-sharing platforms have been treated as part of the same category, as if a premium TV show and a user-uploaded unboxing video are interchangeable environments. They’re not, and the numbers back it up.
This matters because while much of what is on YouTube is TV-like, much is still not and brands can’t choose between 90 second unboxing videos and 90 minute podcasts.
This provides an opening for the television industry to broadcast a message about better recall, stronger trust, and more meaningful brand impact. And that it’s time to start lumping streaming TV in with linear TV platforms, not video-sharing ones.
