65m for the football, and 5m for the wrestling
Welcome to the first newsletter of 2025. This week’s 5 stories look at the success of ‘live’ in the age of on demand, the growing ad opportunities in streaming, Amazon’s latest expansive move in retail media, and the continuing importance of SEO.
Netflix has had a good few weeks, boosted by the success of their new move into live sports. Their first ever Christmas Day NFL games (with a Beyonce concert in the middle) reached an audience of 65m in the US alone, with more viewers in the 200+ markets it was available in. In addition its new regular Monday night WWE RAW attracted nearly 5m globally. Beyond the live events, its other shows have done well too - the second season of Squid Game has already clocked up more than 900m hours viewed, making it Netflix’ second most viewed non-English language show of all time, after two weeks. Remember that about a quarter of Netflix households now see ads with their programmes; this is a huge global audience.
Disney released some new numbers on their TV ads at CES: They now have 157m active monthly viewers across their different streaming platforms, including 112m in the US and Canada. There is not complete transparency on the numbers, but essentially North America, where they have Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, makes up a bit over two thirds, with the other 45m coming from the 12 European markets where they have an ad tier on Disney+. The numbers are based on the average viewers per household (rather than accounts), with a global average being 2.6, so my rough estimate is that something like 17m households in Europe are on the ad tier.
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Amazon has started a beta with a small number of sites, that allows the sites to serve ads using Amazon ad tech and tools, including targeting and measurement, where sales and fulfillment are made on Amazon, but the shopper data stays with the sites where the ads are placed. It allows smaller merchants to show product ads on their search, browse, and product pages, where the ads are able to incorporate availability and price. Amazon has long been extending the reach of its ad network beyond its own properties, but this gives the other retailer more control over the data. In a way this is a response to Shopify’s offering, which allows other retailers to display ads, with Shopify providing fulfilment. This is just one signal that retail media is going to get even bigger and more sophisticated in 2025.
Nothing like a big merger story to start the year. Stock photography and footage is a growing area (everyone needs pictures and videos to illustrate their content) but also facing disruption from generative AI (lots of blogs and trade publications now seem to use generated content as well, or instead). & of course the AI companies rely on stock images and videos to help train their own models, so there are huge new revenue streams emerging from all the different models that need to be trained. The deal is subject to regulatory approval, but in 2025 it looks like size matters more than ever.
New research, based on 10,000 questions asked to ChatGTP, suggests that there is a strong correlation between brands appearing on page 1 of Google search results and appearing in answers generated by ChatGPT. Bear in mind that this is only from one study, although an earlier study found that 75% of Google AI Overview answers came from links in the top 12 organic rankings. What this suggests is that, even if AI does give people new places to search, making sure that your brand ranks highly on ‘traditional’ search is still crucial.