YouTube is more transparent than CTV. Let that sink in.
In 2025, the fastest-growing segment in programmatic media is now less transparent than the walled garden we have spent the last decade criticizing for opacity. And the consequences are already showing up in the market.
Look where the major media companies landed this quarter. Disney reported declines in advertising revenue and slowing streaming growth. Comcast showed softness around Peacock. Paramount posted another difficult quarter with widening losses.
Behind closed doors, publishers are telling me that CTV spending is flattening, performance is plateauing and buyers are increasingly hesitant to push budgets further.
The reason is not complicated. When buyers cannot see what they are buying, they cannot commit their spend with conviction.
On YouTube, a buyer can see the channel title and the exact video where their ad ran (for 30% to 60% of impressions, on average). There is a foundation for measurement and brand safety.
Across CTV, you get app-level reporting, and if you’re lucky, a genre label. A small handful of MVPDs offer channel- or network-level transparency. Show-level or program-level data is almost entirely withheld because most publishers fear buyers will cherry-pick the most in-demand content and disrupt their yield strategy.
The story they sell vs. the story we see
What makes this lack of transparency even more frustrating is the disconnect between the way publishers pitch their inventory and the way it is actually sold.
Every direct publisher sales pitch tells a story about the strength of the content, its cultural relevance and its passionate viewership. In the publisher’s mind, the content supposedly differentiates them and sets them apart as premium.
But the second that inventory is sold programmatically, all of that positioning evaporates. The content disappears behind a black box. Buyers are handed anonymous bundles without any clarity into what content was included.
You cannot sell me on the power of your storytelling and then refuse to tell me what story my ad appeared next to. You cannot market premium and deliver a blind bill of goods.
The irony is that more transparency would actually help publishers. When you make it impossible for buyers to track show-level performance, inventory becomes interchangeable. Optimizing becomes guesswork. Budgets get sprayed across fragmented media packages. With OEM carriage agreements, many buyers end up buying the same publisher directly and then unknowingly buying that same publisher indirectly through another path. It looks like buyers have a choice, but all we get is duplication and waste.
Regression packaged as innovation
Television was not built this way. Linear TV always operated on the show and network level, where supply and demand reflected the cost of making content and the value of audience engagement.
CTV has corrupted that model by copying the worst behaviors of display and online video. Everything is audience first and content last. That is not innovation. It is a regression.
When transparency does exist in CTV, the results speak for themselves. I’ve run campaigns through Spectrum that offered true show-level transparency. We built an inclusion list of top-performing linear shows. It was the highest-performing tactic across entire campaigns.
When content performs and buyers can see it, publishers win. When everything is blind, nobody does.
There are companies actually moving the CTV space forward.
- Amazon provides real-time show-level reporting on its owned-and-operated Prime Video.
- Olyzon has built a content-first CTV platform that enables activation around content data.
- Iris TV is driving adoption of a content ID framework that can unlock actual content-based measurement.
- Spectrum offers 100% transparent show-level supply.
- Peer39 enables contextual and suitability-based CTV buying through segments by using content-level and quality signals that help buyers avoid low-value and unsafe inventory.
These are the companies doing the work that matters.
But bringing digital’s legacy of opacity into CTV is holding us back.
Heading into 2026, my challenge to the CTV industry is simple: Be better than Google.
“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
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