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Let's get the uncomfortable truth out of the way first: Netflix is not winning connected TV advertising. Not even close. YouTube pulled in $60 billion in total revenue last year. Netflix's entire ad business? $1.5 billion. That's a rounding error on Alphabet's earnings call. A line item smaller than what YouTube generates in a single quarter — in a single month, really, if you squint.

And yet every media buyer I talk to, every upfront deck crossing CMO desks, every agency strategy doc getting red-penned in conference rooms from Midtown to Marina del Rey — they're all obsessed with Netflix. Not YouTube. Not Amazon. Netflix.

So what gives?

Here's what's actually happening, and trust me, it's a much bigger story than who's "winning" CTV.

The real Netflix ad story has almost nothing to do with connected TV market share. It's about the structural demolition of linear television's advertising economy — a collapse that's been building for years, and Netflix just showed up with a wrecking ball and a subscriber base approaching a billion people.

Let's talk numbers, because the numbers are brutal.

In 2013, linear TV commanded 41% of global ad spend. Forty-one percent. That was the business. That was the sun around which the entire advertising solar system orbited. Every upfront, every scatter buy, every Super Bowl spot — all of it existed because linear TV owned nearly half of every marketing dollar on the planet.

Today? Linear TV sits at roughly 12% of global ad spend.

Read that again. A business that represented nearly half of all advertising dollars a decade ago has been cut by two-thirds. And it's not done bleeding. Global linear TV spend is projected to crater to about $139 billion in 2026 — down 28% over twelve years. In the US alone, we're looking at roughly $48 billion in 2026, falling 7% year-over-year with absolutely no floor in sight.

That money didn't evaporate. It moved. And increasingly, it's moving to Netflix.

Here's the trajectory that has everyone's attention: Netflix went from zero ad revenue to $1.5 billion in roughly two years. They're guiding to $3 billion in 2026 — another clean double. WARC and Omdia project Netflix will capture 9.2% of all global CTV ad spend by 2027, with ad revenue growth clocking in at 58% year-over-year while the broader CTV market grows at a comparatively sleepy 9.9%.

By 2030? Forecasts have Netflix clearing $8 billion in ad revenue.

For context, WPP says that $3 billion 2026 number would make Netflix only the 27th-largest global ad seller — behind France's RTL Group, which, no offense to RTL, is not exactly the company keeping anyone up at night. Netflix is still tiny in absolute terms. But nobody in advertising has ever grown this fast from a standing start.

And here's the part Netflix's management loves to say out loud: they think the smallness is a feature. Their word for it is "insulation" — as in, we're so small relative to total revenue that a bad ad quarter doesn't touch us. Subscription fees still account for 97% of Netflix's business. The ad tier is pure upside.

That's either brilliant strategic patience or the kind of thing you say right before the market decides your ad business is actually the whole point. I'd bet on the latter.

Here's where the story gets really interesting — and where most of the coverage gets it wrong.

The conventional narrative is clean: Netflix is "disrupting" CTV. Taking share from YouTube, eating Disney's lunch, that whole bit. The reality is messier and more consequential.

Netflix is pulling ad dollars from two places simultaneously.

First, from linear TV. This is the big one. Netflix more than doubled its upfront commitments for the 2025-26 season and closed deals with every major holding company. That's not experimental CTV budget. That's money being explicitly relabeled from "TV upfront" to "Netflix." The reallocation is structural, not cyclical. Nobody is going back.

Second, from other CTV players. eMarketer data shows YouTube's share of CTV ad spend is expected to dip as Netflix, Peacock, and Prime Video grow faster. Netflix isn't just siphoning from the dying linear ecosystem — it's taking bites out of the digital players too. Live sports (NFL Christmas, WWE), franchise-driven sponsorships, interactive ad formats — these aren't "streaming experiments." They're competitive weapons aimed squarely at YouTube's dominance of the living room screen.

So when WARC describes Netflix's strategy as "targeting competitor share rather than relying on market expansion" — pay attention. Netflix isn't riding the CTV wave. Netflix is the CTV wave, and it doesn't particularly care whose sandcastle it washes away.

Meanwhile, the rest of the streaming landscape is fragmenting into irrelevance. Per Nielsen's January 2026 Gauge data: YouTube leads US TV time at 12.5%. Netflix is second at 8.8%. After that? Disney at 4.9%. Amazon at 4.1%. Warner Bros. Discovery at a tragic 1.4%. The gap between the top two and everyone else isn't narrowing. It's a canyon.

By 2028, CTV ad spend is projected to surpass traditional TV globally — roughly $47 billion for connected versus $45 billion for linear. That crossover is the ad industry's equivalent of a tectonic plate shift. And Netflix is positioning itself to be one of maybe three or four platforms that capture the overwhelming majority of that spend.

But — and this is a real but — can Netflix's measurement and ad infrastructure actually handle the money that's headed its way? Because right now, advertisers are writing bigger and bigger checks to a platform that still can't cleanly reconcile its reach metrics with YouTube's, can't offer the programmatic depth buyers are used to, and just invented a new audience metric (Monthly Active Viewers) that nobody else uses.

That gap between advertiser enthusiasm and measurement reality? That's the story of 2026.

This was the free appetizer. The main course is for subscribers.

→ Part II: "Inside the Netflix Ad Experience: What Buyers Actually Think" We go deep on what advertisers are actually saying behind closed doors — the ad formats, the CPMs, the attention metrics Netflix is pitching (8× brand favorability, anyone?), and the measurement gaps that are giving media directors heartburn. If you buy media or sell it, this is the piece you need.

→ Part III: "YouTube, Netflix, and the Battle for the Living Room's Next $50 Billion" The competitive landscape, the Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition play, Netflix's expansion into podcasts and gaming and live events, and the big strategic question: does Netflix become a top-10 global ad seller by 2030, or does the measurement gap keep it stuck in the mid-tier? We lay out the scenarios.

Subscribe now to get Parts II and III delivered straight to your inbox.

All data sourced from WARC Media Platform Insights (February 2026), Nielsen Gauge (January 2026), eMarketer, Omdia, and company earnings disclosures. The author's opinions are his own and — unlike Netflix's ad tier — are not available at a discount.