The Shiny Surface of Liars and Roku Math

✨ Or: How Roku Became the CTV Kingpin with a God Complex

Roku strutted into 2025 like it was Moses descending from Mount Sinai, stone tablets in one hand and a pitch deck in the other.

If you believe the headlines — and let’s face it, their PR team is counting on it — Roku is on top of the world. Ninety million households tuned in. One hundred twenty-seven billion hours streamed. And let’s not forget the shiny new Ads Manager, which supposedly makes launching a national campaign as effortless as texting your ex at 2 a.m. after two martinis and a broken New Year’s resolution.

But let’s peel back the lacquered surface. Underneath Roku’s self-anointed throne lies a mess of half-truths, overpromises, and numbers so squishy they make a wet sponge look firm.

📊 90 Million Households & 127 Billion Hours Watched

Sure, Roku’s Q4 2024 earnings trumpet these numbers with the kind of chest-thumping usually reserved for Super Bowl MVPs. They claim, with religious fervor, that “Roku now has 90 million active accounts globally, with streaming hours reaching 127 billion in 2024.”

But what they don’t say — and what you’d only notice if you, say, read footnotes like a forensic accountant — is that this number includes a parade of what the rest of us might call statistical hallucinations.

We're talking duplicate accounts in the same household (congratulations, Roku, you’ve discovered cloning), forgotten Roku TVs playing reruns in dental offices, and “active” accounts that haven’t been touched since pre-pandemic Tiger King. And let’s be honest: how many of those hours were streamed with actual eyeballs watching, versus someone asleep, passed out, or out of the room entirely while Judge Judy drones in the background?

These aren’t viewers. They’re warm pixels in empty rooms.

🎯 “No Longer Incremental, But Fundamental”

Now enter Jay Askinasi, Roku’s knight in PowerPoint armor, fresh off his horse from Publicis. His mission? Convince Wall Street and every media planner from here to Hudson Yards that Roku isn’t just one of many tools in the CTV shed — it’s the whole damn toolbox.

Jay told us that Roku is “no longer incremental, but fundamental.” It’s the kind of bold, jaw-forward statement that sounds powerful in a keynote echo chamber but collapses under the weight of reality, like a poorly made IKEA cabinet.

Because here’s the kicker: agency buyers aren’t buying it. Literally or figuratively.

According to a Digiday report from February 2025, media planners are pushing back on Roku’s new gospel.

One buyer quipped, “They’re still a DSP with a hardware bundle.” And that’s not just shade — it’s a precision-guided missile. Roku’s pitch may be loud, but much of the industry still sees them as the same glorified USB stick that just happens to run ads in between boot screens and menu browsing.

They're pitching themselves as the next must-buy media empire, but to many marketers, it’s like showing up to the Met Gala wearing a Bluetooth speaker and calling it couture.

🤖 “Ads Manager as Easy as Postmates”

Let’s talk about Roku’s 2025 product launch — a ceremony so full of buzzwords and self-congratulation it could’ve been held in Davos.

The centerpiece? Their new Ads Manager, pitched as the CTV equivalent of Uber Eats. “Just plug in your credit card, upload your creative, and boom — your ad’s on national television.”

The promise was seductively simple: democratize TV advertising. Open the gates of CTV to small businesses, DTC startups, and performance marketers who can barely spell “programmatic.”

But according to AdWeek in April 2025, the reality of Roku’s self-serve platform has been more Black Mirror than Shark Tank. Buyers are reporting a slew of issues: glitchy interfaces, targeting that misfires worse than a drunk archer, and overbilling complaints stacking up like unread Slack notifications on a Friday afternoon.

One small agency executive told us off-record that their campaign budget “vanished into a black hole of buffering ads and no results,” while another simply said, “We got charged twice — once for the ad and once for the trauma.”

🦚 The PR Polish vs. The Cracks Beneath

Roku’s PR machine is working harder than a freshman trying to cover up a missed final exam. Every quote, every metric, every keynote moment is wrapped in a velvet glove and handed to the press like it’s gospel truth.

But the cracks? Oh, they’re there.

Let’s start with the Forbes investigation from November 2024, which uncovered that 1.6 million “ghost” Roku devices had been used in fraudulent ad campaigns — essentially spoofed hardware created by bad actors to siphon off ad dollars from unsuspecting brands. Roku responded with a classic shrug: “We’ve enhanced our fraud detection.” Translation: we got caught, we’re pretending to fix it, and we’re hoping you stop asking questions.

Then there’s the ANA report from January 2025, which gently — okay, not so gently — pointed out that Roku’s famous “incrementality” numbers were about as credible as a Tinder profile that says “6 feet tall” but stands suspiciously close to countertops in every photo. According to ANA, Roku’s attribution model is stacked in its favor, designed to inflate perceived performance and make every ad look like a miracle, even when it’s just noise.

But wait, there’s more!

The Verge reported in March 2025 that Roku’s OS 12 update was bricking older devices, sparking a wave of user backlash. Instead of patching it, Roku’s fix was a subtle nudge toward “buying our new Roku Pro.” Imagine if your phone stopped working after an update, and Apple’s solution was, “Go buy an iPhone 17.” Oh wait…

🎭 The Bottom Line

Roku’s 2025 “we run the living room” narrative is real… but incredibly fragile. Yes, they lead in OS penetration. Yes, they’ve got ad tech tools and a ton of eyeballs floating around the ecosystem.

But:

• 🧟 Their “90 million households” include the walking dead of streaming.

• 🎩 Their “self-serve ad tools” work better in theory than in reality.

• 🧮 Their “measurement models” are just fancy ways of counting things twice and hoping no one notices.

• 🧨 And their fraud problem is… not fixed.

So, are they dominant? Sure.
But are they trustworthy? Transparent? Built for long-term brand value?

That’s a different question entirely.

And if your media plan starts with a Roku deck and ends with mysteriously disappearing impressions, you’re not alone. Welcome to the world of Roku Math, where everything is up and to the right — until you look a little closer.