Commentary
Will The Upfront TV Market Be Softer Vs. A Year Ago? Prime Video To Blame?
- by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, April 17, 2024
Upfront TV media buyers expect a soft overall marketplace again, according to all media agency executives at the MediaPost Outfront event held this week.
But the main question is: How soft?
Last year, the linear TV marketplace upfront advertising market was down 5% in total revenue volume to $19 billion, …
Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
Wayne, a few points to note. First, prime time is only part of the "Linear" upfront. It also includes other dayparts plus national syndication and a small amount for unwireds. So all together we are talking about something like $30-32 billion for "linear TV" not just the prime time figure. Also, at this point the buyers and sellers are just posturing--with the buyers claiming that ad sales will be "soft" while the sellers, no doubt, will claim that they can command modest increases. As for the CTV figures, last year's $8 billion estimate included all sellers not just those AVODs or FASTs owned by the "legacy networks". In addition, there were other sales---one might dub them "scatter" for CTV but we don't have a tight figure on that one.
As for Amazon, while it is a new factor in the upfront, Amazon Prime with ads probably commands a mere 2% of the total TV viewing pie while linear TV gets about 50% and ad-supported streaming--sans Amazon----gets roughly 19-20%. So it's hard to see how Amazon Prime is going to shake up the upfront market---it's simply one more decent sized player in the game.