US CTV ad spend growth rebounded in 2024 after a relatively slow 2023, according to IAB’s 2025 Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report, driven by the end of the actors’ strike, a surge in live sports streaming and increased buying via self-serve tools. IAB’s report, developed in partnership with Advertiser Perceptions and Guideline, found that CTV ad spend grew 16 percent year-on-year in 2024, a significant jump from 2023’s nine percent growth.
The majority of CTV’s growth is being funded through reallocations of other budgets, with just 36 percent of advertisers who are increasing their CTV spend in 2025 doing so through an overall expansion of their media ad budgets. But IAB’s data contradicts any lingering conceptions that CTV’s growth simply represents a shift of linear budgets onto streaming platforms.
Thirty-six percent of advertisers who are planning to spend more on CTV this year say they will reallocate budgets from social media to do so — the same proportion who say they will reallocate budgets from linear TV. Thirty-two percent plan to reallocate budgets from paid search — a surprising finding, given the massive difference between the two media channels, but one which perhaps demonstrates the value buyers are placing on CTV.
These figures don’t speak to the strict volumes of spend moving from one channel to the other, since for some advertisers these reallocations might be much larger than for others. But they do at least show that CTV is effectively competing with a wide variety of competing media channels.
Indeed 68 percent of buyers surveyed by IAB said they rank CTV as a ‘must buy’ channel, the highest ranking of any video channel measured in the report. Sixty-two percent labelled social video a ‘must buy’, compared with 39 percent for national broadcast/cable TV, and 37 percent for online video. Audience-indexed linear TV ranked lowest, at 27 percent.
Social video pulls ahead
Overall, the US digital video market (which includes CTV) grew 18 percent last year, and is set for a further 14 percent growth this year, reaching $72.4 billion in total. This mirrors rapid growth in video display spend in the UK, which IAB UK says was up 20 percent year-on-year in 2024.
Last year, digital video ad spend narrowly surpassed linear TV for the first time, accounting for 51 percent of total video spend compared to 49 percent for linear TV. This year, that gap is set to widen significantly, with digital video making up 58 percent of all video spend. Looking back over the past five years, the shift is even more stark — in 2020, digital video accounted for just 29 percent of all video spend, with linear TV making up 71 percent.
Source: ‘2025 Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report: Part One’; IAB, Advertiser Perceptions, and Guideline
Given that trend, broadcasters which operate in both the linear TV and streaming spaces will hope they can continue to win budgets from a variety of sources, rather than just capturing lost linear TV investment.
Last year, both social video and online video saw faster growth rates than CTV, up 21 percent and 17 percent respectively. Social video’s growth brought total social video spend ($23.7 billion) narrowly above CTV spend ($23.6 billion). This year, that gap is projected to grow (despite the fact that more buyers class CTV as a ‘must buy’). IAB forecasts that US social video spend will grow 15 percent in 2025, while CTV is expected to increase 13 percent.
While buyers seem to be enthusiastic about CTV, social video remains an easy way to reach audiences at scale, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. IAB says the emergence of self-serve CTV buying tools is helping to bring new ad budgets into streaming. Continued investment in tools and initiatives which simplify the buying process could help CTV ad spend remain within touching distance of social video.
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