North American Media Experts
CTV ad spend hits $46.3B globally in 2026 while linear TV keeps losing ground. Here's where the money is moving and what it means for your media plan.
7 min read
If you're still splitting your TV budget the same way you did five years ago, you're probably overpaying for reach you can't measure and underinvesting in audiences you can actually target.
The shift from linear to connected TV isn't a prediction anymore — it's already happened. The question brands and media buyers need to answer now isn't whether to move budget into CTV. It's how much, how fast, and what to expect when they do.
Here's a clear-eyed look at where ad dollars are actually going in 2026 — and what it means for your media strategy.
Linear TV is traditional broadcast and cable television. Ads run on a fixed schedule. You buy time slots. You reach whoever happens to be watching at that moment. You get a GRP report afterward and make your best guess about whether it worked.
Connected TV (CTV) is any TV screen connected to the internet — smart TVs, streaming sticks, gaming consoles, and apps like Hulu, Peacock, Paramount+, Disney+, and YouTube TV. CTV ads are served programmatically, meaning they're targeted to specific audiences based on real data, not just time slots and demographics.
The experience for the viewer can look identical. The experience for the advertiser is completely different.
The data is unambiguous.
CTV ad spending is projected to reach $46.3 billion globally in 2026, with U.S. spend alone crossing $38 billion. That represents double-digit year-over-year growth that has continued without interruption for the past four years.
Linear TV, meanwhile, continues to lose ground. Traditional TV ad revenue has declined steadily as audiences cut the cord or never subscribed to cable in the first place. Cord-cutting households in the U.S. now outnumber traditional pay-TV households, and that gap widens every quarter.
Major advertisers are responding accordingly. Brands that once committed 60–70% of video budgets to linear are now running 50/50 or heavier CTV splits — and some performance-focused advertisers have abandoned linear entirely for direct response campaigns.
Programmatic advertising overall now controls 90% of all digital display — and CTV is increasingly falling under that programmatic umbrella. For a deeper look at programmatic CPM benchmarks across channels, see our guide to programmatic advertising costs in 2026.
It's not just audience migration that's driving the shift. It's the fundamental capability gap between what linear and CTV can do for an advertiser.
Linear TV targets by daypart and program genre. You're buying a broad window of viewers who happen to be watching the evening news or a home improvement show.
CTV lets you target by household income, purchase history, geographic area down to the zip code, browsing behavior, and first-party audience data you upload yourself. You can reach in-market car buyers, homeowners within 15 miles of a dealership, or lapsed customers who haven't purchased in 90 days — all on the TV screen.
One of the longest-standing frustrations in linear TV advertising is attribution. You run a flight, awareness moves a few points, and you call it a success. Proving that TV drove website visits, store traffic, or actual sales has always been a challenge.
CTV closes that gap significantly. Advertisers can measure incremental reach, website visits following ad exposure, app installs, foot traffic to physical locations, and with pixel-based measurement, actual conversions. The accountability that performance marketers expect from paid search and social is increasingly available in CTV.
Anyone who's ever run a heavy linear flight knows the nightmare of overexposure — the same viewer seeing your ad 15 times in a weekend because they happened to watch a lot of cable news. CTV platforms allow you to cap frequency across devices, so a household doesn't get hammered with the same spot while you're burning through budget on low-incremental impressions.
Minimum buys for national linear TV advertising are typically out of reach for mid-market brands. CTV has democratized TV advertising — many platforms now offer self-serve options with budgets starting in the thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands, making premium video inventory accessible to businesses that never could have considered TV before.
This isn't a complete write-off of linear TV. There are scenarios where it still plays an important role.
Live sports remain the crown jewel of linear. NFL, NBA, March Madness — these are the last true mass reach moments in television, and they command premium pricing for a reason. Brands chasing broad national awareness with massive budgets still find value in live sports adjacency.
Local broadcast retains value in certain markets and categories, particularly for political advertising, local retail, and automotive — industries where geographic concentration and local trust matter.
Older demographics still index higher on linear viewing than on streaming, so brands targeting consumers 65+ may find linear TV more efficient for specific campaigns.
But even these strongholds are shifting. Streaming rights for live sports are increasingly moving to digital platforms. Local broadcast viewership continues to age. The window where linear makes unambiguous sense for most advertisers is narrowing every year.
If your brand is still treating CTV as a test-and-learn line item while protecting the linear TV budget, it's worth pressure-testing that assumption. A few questions worth asking:
Our team helps brands assess exactly this split — see how we approach programmatic media planning and full-service digital media strategy.
CTV refers to the device (a TV set connected to the internet), while OTT (over-the-top) refers to the method of content delivery — streaming video delivered over the internet rather than cable or satellite. In practice, the terms are often used interchangeably in ad buying, but technically CTV is a subset of OTT focused specifically on TV-screen delivery.
CPMs for CTV typically range from $15–$40, compared to $5–$20 for broad linear TV buys. However, CTV's superior targeting, measurability, and lower waste often make the effective cost per outcome significantly lower than linear for most advertisers.
Yes. Many CTV platforms and DSPs now offer self-serve options with no minimum spend requirements, making CTV accessible for brands with budgets starting at a few thousand dollars per month. Minimum campaign commitments have dropped significantly over the past two years.
CTV measurement options include pixel-based website visit tracking, app install attribution, foot traffic studies, brand lift surveys, household-level retargeting, and incremental reach analysis. The measurement ecosystem for CTV is meaningfully more advanced than traditional linear TV.
The ad industry spent years debating whether CTV would replace linear. That debate is over. CTV is the primary growth channel in video advertising, and the brands and agencies that have built real competency in programmatic CTV have a meaningful advantage over those still treating it as a secondary investment.
The dollars have moved. The question is whether your media strategy has moved with them.
North American Media Experts helps brands and agencies plan, execute, and measure digital media campaigns across CTV, programmatic, DOOH, and connected channels. Book an intro call with Ryan to discuss how we can put your ad spend to work — or start with a free media audit.