If Roku’s third quarter earnings call could be distilled into a single phrase, it would be “early days.” (With “bullish” as a runner-up, perhaps.)
The company posted solid results for Q3 2025 on Thursday. Platform revenue grew 17% year over year in Q3, from $908 million to $1.06 billion. This marks the first time that Roku has cracked the billion-dollar mark with platform revenue in 2025, with the last time being in Q4 2024.
Overall, revenue for Q3 increased 14% YoY, from $1.06 billion in 2024 to $1.21 in 2025.
These results have given Roku “a lot of confidence” in their ability to maintain double digit revenue growth in 2026, CEO Anthony Wood told investors during a public call that day. The company raised its outlook for its platform business to 17% growth for the full year.
But as most of the leadership team noted, it’s too soon for the business to rest on its laurels – not with so many of its offerings and initiatives still in those aforementioned early days.
Performance review
Just like last quarter, video advertising has continued to grow faster than the OTT and digital ad markets, according to Roku’s quarterly letter to shareholders.
The letter also states that this growth primarily stems from new integrations with third party DSPs, including a partnership with Amazon DSP that was announced in June, as well as strong momentum within the relatively new Roku Ads Manager.
Roku’s DSP partnerships and Ads Manager product have long been intended to drive better efficiency and performance, said President Charlie Collier.
Both offerings were also designed to bring in new clients, which appears to be working so far. A whopping 90% of the advertisers that used the Ad Manager tool in Q3 were new to Roku, Collier said.
Performance marketers are becoming more important to Roku’s success, too, the shareholder letter suggests – particularly clients from DTC ecommerce, gaming and mobile apps verticals. (The latter two categories aren’t too surprising, considering that the company announced a recent integration update with AppsFlyer at the tail end of last quarter.)
Say howdy!
Last quarter also saw the release of Howdy, Roku’s new ad-free streaming service that costs only $2.99 a month. The low price is meant to cater to a “large, underserved market,” said CEO Anthony Wood.
Although it’s still early days, Wood said that he’s excited by the new streaming brand’s potential – especially based on how well their other streaming service, the Roku Channel app, has already performed.
Overall streaming hours for Roku increased to 36.5 billion this past quarter, an increase of 4.5 billion hours compared to last year. The Roku Channel in particular accounted for 6.2% of all US streaming time in Q3, according to Nielsen.
Although impressive, those numbers don’t automatically translate to more income, admitted Chief Financial Officer Dan Jedda. But monetizable hours, such as the ones that come from Roku’s premium tier subscription lineup, appear to be growing at a similar rate as well.
Moreover, nearly 90% of engagement on the Roku Channel app came from display ads across Roku’s OS, the shareholder letter states. Which might explain why the company is now working on a massive new home page update to increase those engagement rates and monetization opportunities even further.
The update likely won’t roll out until early 2026. But once it does, you can probably expect to see even more shoppable ads on your Roku television device on top of everything else.
“We’re bullish on shoppable,” said Collier. “It’s one of those opportunities that I think is early, but working.”
