It’s no longer unusual for a series episode to be interrupted in the middle to insert an ad. This happens on Amazon Prime or Netflix and Disney+’s ad-supported plans. At the same time, ad content is piling up on YouTube, which also saturates Instagram and TikTok.
The Internet advertising business is immense. That much will be reached 1.34 trillion dollars in 2026 (Spain’s GDP in 2025 was 1.69 trillion euros), up 11.9% from the previous year, according to advertising sector analysis firm WARC Media. It’s interesting that VOD streaming platforms will earn 15.1% more from advertising, up to $48.4 billion. It was a sector that promised to avoid advertising in exchange for a monthly subscription.
“After the pandemic, the growth of streaming platforms, which until now had been quite progressive, started to stagnate,” said Elena Neira, professor of communication at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and author of ‘Streaming Wars: The New Television’. This is when Netflix loses subscribers. Panic spread to Hollywood, which saw platforms as an unstoppable engine of growth, and to another important place: Wall Street.
Neera explains that investors have changed the way they measure success. Import stopped due to number of customers of income. “Growth (of customers) was a very interesting metric because, even if the companies weren’t making money, there was a possibility that they would in the future,” said the UOC professor. “At the moment when customer decline is a possibility, Wall Street begins to lose interest in this growth and demand their healthy accounts.”
Advertising was introduced for two reasons: it increased profits for each user and it helped retain them. Those who didn’t want to pay that much had a cheaper option with advertising.
Advertising reaches every corner
At this point, little remains of the original Internet culture, which began as a spontaneous subculture. With this desire to share knowledge without earning in return: if someone knew about castles in medieval castles, they wrote about it, uploaded their own photos. Or enthusiastically – which now seems silly – to connect with someone from Australia, from Singapore, to connect with people who live on the other side of the world.
During that chat IRC and web pages primitiveIn the prehistory of the blogosphere, there was genuine optimism. The Internet began with teenage fascination and collaborative idealism before becoming an economic steamroller, in the world’s most commercialized place.
Two basic ways to make money online soon emerged: direct payments (either through subscriptions or selling services or products, including e-commerce) and advertising. You only need to look at a graph of the evolution of advertising spending on the Internet over the years to be aware of the importance of this aspect. This is reflected in this collection of data from the Statista portal, which measures online advertising revenue in the United States from 2000 to 2025. A quarter of a century of astounding growth: $8.09 billion to $294.59 billion.
At first, advertising was a way to support small online ventures like a blog. Later it became a million dollar and billion dollar business that became concentrated in a few hands. Today it crosses all layers and corners of the internet The flow of ads on some platforms is noticeable.
“YouTube capitalizes on the fact that it has a growing share of usage, especially in television,” Neera said. “It’s becoming more saturated because it has many more reproductions and, therefore, it has a much larger target audience, making its advertising more effective.” As a reference, YouTube’s screen share on television in the US is 13.8%, while Netflix maintains 8% and traditional broadcast television 19.2%.
The UOC professor believes that YouTube introduces more Ad density Because it has more power to do so. But he doesn’t think it’s a ploy to push users into paying subscriptions, as it might sometimes seem. And plans with ads are more profitable. This is exactly what streaming platforms have realized.
“When they arrived, the great promise was that they came without advertising,” says Monica Morrow, founder and CCO of ad agency This Is Libre, with an extensive career as a creative. “And the big surprise was when Netflix said it had to place ads. Logically, advertisers know there’s a lot of viewers out there, too.” The fit was easy.
The streaming platform plans to bill $45 billion in North America this year with ads, according to analyst firm Ampere Analysis. This would represent 54% of what companies earn from subscriptions. “All the platforms have launched plans with ads and they are particularly aggressive in marketing these plans because they are more interested,” emphasizes Neera. “The price increase for the subscription without ads is a way to push us to the plan with ads, because it makes us a much more profitable user. We have to pay the fee and, at the same time, advertise.”
Facing everything to launch advertising on streaming services, indicated Monica Moro, from This is Libre: “Platforms like Movistar or Amazon Prime have that opportunity because they need financing and they have to go to their brands. And they have a captive audience. They are listeners with more interest in specific brands. And it’s cheaper than line television.
he Fewer ads Compared to traditional television, of course. While Neira admits it’s possible that advertising pressure has increased on VOD platforms, the market average is “4 minutes per hour of programming and that doesn’t usually fluctuate.” The UOC professor focused on user perception: “I feel that the user was caught by surprise, precisely because the premise with which streaming emerged was antithetical to how television works.” It was a deal: a cheap subscription gave access to a catalog without the interruption of advertising.
This has been changed. And Neira studies how this third shift has played out among Spanish users in the paper ‘The Rise of AVOD in Spain: The Impact of Advertising on the Streaming User Experience’. “It took some time for users to get used to it, but what the data says is that there is a very high proportion of people who contract plans with ads. And interestingly, most of these people come from a plan without ads,” he added.
This indicates something very basic: people accept advertising in exchange for a service. cheap. “If Netflix customers don’t want to watch ads, they have to pay a higher monthly fee,” Moro highlights. “Ultimately, this is all a business. All media outlets take off advertising and brand revenue.” Platforms that don’t offer advertising for creative reasons have to directly impact users with the amount of money they forgo earning.
Given the increasing presence of advertising, adaptation has become necessary. “Consumers are increasingly switching between payment and advertising platforms,” Nera said “Instead of combining several services, they have a subscription contract without advertising. Or they join convergence plans, for example an offer from an operator like Movistar, a telephone service that offers access to platforms without advertising.”
Social networks, another level of advertising
The situation is different in other areas where advertising is already prevalent. “With YouTube, I think people have already embraced advertising as an inherent element of the platform,” Nera said. But this portal is not alone in the proliferation of video ads. Instagram and TikTok have seen significant growth in their ad revenue.
As a reference, social networks in the US will bill $394.6 billion for advertising in 2026, 21.3% higher According to information from WARC media, compared to the previous year. Income is highest in this category. And one of the results is saturation.
“An ad can also be live on a mobile phone. You see it on YouTube or Instagram and it works because you like it,” says Morrow. “But I also think that there’s annoying advertising that’s tied to everything that happens on the network, with those fast formats that constantly interrupt you. And added to that is influencer endorsement advertising.”
Advertising investment in social networks Increases year by year. And short video platforms, which have become symbols of the attention economy, monopolize much of it. Although perhaps the future of online advertising is not doomed to the speed of TikTok or Instagram. “I think there’s also a trend toward longer content because it doesn’t look like an ad,” says Morrow “Ads are increasingly shorter, more ephemeral, more intrusive.
So if you suddenly offer three-minute content that doesn’t look like an ad but tells a very entertaining story with incredible production, brands can connect with audiences more qualitatively.”
Picture | Mahrous Houses, Marques Kaspbrak, appshunter.io
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