Tubi now has 80 million average monthly users, up from 67 million a year ago, parent company Fox said, with a 36% year-over-year uptick in platform usage driving revenue up by more than 22% from January to March.

That’s in the face of a down fiscal Q3 for Fox’s broader television segment, which saw a 22% decrease in quarterly revenues due to the lack of the Super Bowl.

Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said in the company’s quarterly financial report that those losses would have been even greater if they weren’t “offset by continued growth at Tubi.”

Also read: Fox Has Net Income of $666 Million in 3rd Quarter

In the latest iteration of Nielsen’s “The Gauge” report, which tracks market share for total U.S. TV viewing, Tubi accounted for 1.6% of all U.S. TV watching in March.

That puts Tubi ahead of other ad-supported streaming services including Peacock, Roku Channel and Pluto TV, and even subscription streaming platforms like Max and Paramount Plus.

Murdoch noted that in March 2023, the Tubi accounted for only 1% of total American viewing.

“Tubi finished only marginally behind Disney Plus in market share,” Murdoch said, noting that Tubi's expansion was “faster than any streaming service during the same time.”

Murdoch also revealed on the company’s earnings conference call that 90% of Tubi viewing is on-demand, meaning customers seek out and actively engage with the content they’re watching, rather than just turning on a live channel.

“It’s very important,” Murdoch said, "because when the viewing comes on demand as opposed to passively sitting back and watching our FAST channels, that’s much more valuable to advertisers.

“We are looking forward to showcasing Tubi’s strengths at next week’s upfronts,” Murdoch added.

Too often, media properties’ inventory goes unsold or impressions unfilled and they end up filling their logs with promos, slates and PSAs or run bonus weight for clients (i.e., free spots). While this may help them with client relations or channel promotion, what it doesn’t do is generate revenue. Lost ad inventory is gone forever. 

As viewers are more fragmented than ever, there’s even more unsold or underutilized ad inventory. Media properties with multiple channels, digital channels or streaming services provide more opportunities for revenue generation, but often have huge chunks of unsold time going unused.

With OTT platforms and streaming services, viewers often wind up seeing the same spot over and over again, as frequency capping can be hard to manage across multiple DSPs. Not only does excessive repetition inhibit viewing, but it can also cause viewers to form a negative impression of the advertiser. Sometimes the ad slot isn’t even filled at all and viewers are presented with a 30-second “we’ll be right back” billboard. This creates a less-than-optimal viewing experience, driving away viewers and devaluing the platform.

When media properties have the ability and flexibility to fill their underutilized inventory with ad variety, it breaks up the monotony and keeps viewers engaged while generating additional revenue.

Filled Inventory Leads to Revenue Opportunities

When ad buyers see repetition, pods filled with promos, or PSAs in high-profile time slots, it screams there’s open inventory. Buyers often use this knowledge to drive down rates on advertising buys or request media property run extra spots at no charge.

Media properties have also learned the hard way that when they give too much bonus weight to advertisers as value add, it ceases to be effective. Free spots can become guaranteed spots in future negotiations, which lowers the average spot rate.

Filling remnant ad inventory with different creative doesn’t just generate revenue, it also sends subtle messages to advertisers. When they see that ad pods are full of variety — and often filled with high-quality spots — it improves the perceived value of the media. 

Partnering and Executing

To monetize remnant or unsold inventory effectively, media properties need to have partners who can help by streamlining the process and maximizing inventory value. The ideal media partner has national reach, deep connections to advertisers, and an optimized system for delivery.

Media properties need a partner that provides a unique solution for stations using short-form CPA (Cost Per Action) advertising. Media properties run the ads during unsold inventory and fill logs at their discretion. They get paid when viewers take action. Each ad has a unique call-to-action specifically attributed to the media property airing the spot – such as a unique promo code redemption and/or URL visit, or by calling a toll-free number, ensuring media properties have accurate attribution for revenue with no additional work on their part. Spots are 15, 30 and 60 seconds long and can be delivered in any format needed.

Some of the best CPA offers are lead-generating, spanning a variety of categories:

• Business/finance

• Education

• Healthcare

• Insurance

• Mass torts

• Products

These advertisers don’t traditionally buy local stations, station groups, fragmented streaming properties or local networks, so media properties can access revenue by attracting dollars they otherwise wouldn’t have had the opportunity to obtain and won’t siphon dollars away from the marketplace.

Media Properties Maintain Flexibility

One of the advantages of using CPA ads is that stations and media properties maintain total control and flexibility. In addition, they benefit in numerous other ways:

• Optimize the revenue they generate from CPA ads by seeing which spots generate the most revenue and running those as frequently as they want.

• Traffic managers and sales managers don't have to submit pre-logs, post-logs, or performance affidavits. 

• The business office doesn’t have to generate invoices and statements or worry about collections.

• When viewers call a phone number on a CPA ad, go to a custom URL or use a promo code, this action is automatically recorded and posted to the media properties account.

Maximize Revenue, Keep Viewers Engaged

The right partner and the right solution can lead to maximized revenue for the station and increased satisfaction for the viewer.

Everybody wins.

Steve Schachter is senior VP of Business Development & Distribution for Cannella Media DTC.

Live TV isn’t dead, but it could sure use a jolt.

Networks have increasingly used Twitter, Facebook and other social-media outlets to further engage with their viewers, but a startup called Vivoom is looking to take that interaction to another level by enabling viewers to insert themselves digitally into live TV broadcasts.

The basic idea, in the TV context of Vivoom’s technology platform, is to have viewers record and post video of themselves that a programmer, can in turn, splice into a show — essentially a digital cameo.

Katherine Hays, Vivoom’s co-founder and CEO, has a keen eye for identifying trends in changing consumer behaviors.

Her last company, Massive, created an advertising network for video games. That effort — which for example inserted ads into the context of games with first-person shooters — helped Massive aggregate that audience and, according to Hays, reach as many 18-to-34-year-old men as any TV network. Microsoft bought Massive in 2006 for $280 million and reportedly shut down that unit in the fall of 2010.

Spotted: Consumer Behavior Shift
Hays said that in 2014 she saw an even bigger trend: that consumers, especially those younger than 40, tend to share their lives on social media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat.

“This is an incredible change in consumer behavior, and there are real implications for products,” she said about what was going through her head as she delved deeper into this trend. “What if we can build a technology that helps every product be shareable?”

Though consumers can go direct to Twitter and Instagram to share directly, brands lose control of the relationship with the consumer (and the associated data) when they go that route, she stressed.

Vivoom’s approach is to enable partners to have more control of those shareable interactions (and open up the doors to monetization) with their products and services, while still enabling consumers, particularly younger ones, to distribute that content directly to various social networking channels.

Vivoom has since built the technology to make its idea go, and has already signed on several brands, companies and pro sports teams. They include Microsoft, Capital One, Johnson & Johnson, Maroon 5 and two National Basketball Association teams, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Clippers. Univision is the first TV programmer to come aboard.

“It’s really across industries, because almost everything can be shareable … and with our technology, brands are able to do that in a way that they can know that user and they can control that user’s experience,” Hays said.

The Vivoom and Univision partnership was announced in September at the Mobile World Congress Americas show in San Francisco.

They haven’t gone commercial with the relationship yet. But at the event they showed a mock-up of how viewers of El Chapo, the series about drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, could go about inserting themselves into a scene from the show (pictured).

In that demo, a bug would appear at a bottom corner of the screen directing viewers to shoot a video of themselves and explain how to upload it to Univision (via a website or through the programmer’s app, for example). The network would then pick one and insert it into that night’s broadcast.

“Their No. 1 goal,” Hays said of Univision’s work with Vivoom, “is to increase audience engagement with television” — particularly during commercial breaks, when viewers tend to divide their time with online social networks.

Other goals include driving more tune-in through the sharing aspect of the model, and monetizing the concept through sponsorships.

Hays said Vivoom’s technology is applicable across multiple types of programming, including awards shows, sporting events and entertainment series and dramas.

Though Univision has focused on second-screen engagements through elements like voting and trivia, those have generally been relegated to “isolated” experiences, Matt Kaplan, senior vice president of digital ad sales at Univision, explained during a panel session with Hays at the event. “The shift we’re seeing is about sharing,” he said, describing what’s coming as “Second-Screening 2.0” for TV networks.

Partners Already in Sharing Mood
Vivoom uses a set of technologies to underpin its platform. The first is in the form of a perpetual license to use Boris FX’s Sapphire visual effects engine for mobile that enables Vivoom to be creative in how viewers are inserted into a scene. Vivoom also has some patent pending technology around moderating capabilities that enables a brand gain control of what they are obtaining from consumers and viewers before it is published to the world. A third piece is a client portal that lets networks insert user-generated content into a linear broadcast.

There are several examples of how Vivoom’s technology has been used outside of the broadcast TV world to connect with fans.

Maroon 5, the pop band, has utilized the platform in ways that lets fans put themselves on the cover of its new album, Red Pill Blues, and insert themselves into a scene from its music video for the single, “Cold.”

During last year’s NBA Playoffs, the Boston Celtics enabled fans to shoot and share videos with branded filters that were republished and shown on the jumbo-tron at TD Garden, the team’s home arena.