HOT LIST: Biting The Hand That Feeds You

Alan Wolk

📺 Co-Founder/Lead Analyst, TVREV, 📚 Author, "Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry", 🎤Keynote Speaker

Published Dec 16, 2024

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”— Flannery O’Connor

In a surprising move for a show that gets a whole lot of traction from people watching YouTube clips the next morning, SNL went after YouTube advertising hard in their cold open this week, calling out both the randomness of the interruptions and the low-rentness of most of the ads.

It’s a reminder that while more people may watch YouTube on their TVs than Netflix, the platform still very much feels like something that is not TV.

For now.

This may prove to be scant solace for streaming companies though, if they can’t get their acts together and figure out measurement, identity, transparency and a whole host of other issues that plague the industry.

Because Google, if nothing else, seems to have all that under control and they are most definitely gunning for all those TV ad dollars, given that YouTube is, by their account, TV.

So what’s a streamer to do?

Well for starters, there is contextual targeting, which holds great promise as a way for CTV to get out from under these issues and you can learn all about it in our FREE Special Report—which you can download here.

It will make great reading during those two weeks of Christmas, Hanukkah and New Years where most of us will be taking a well-deserved break before hurtling headlong into CES.

Big thanks to sponsors Anoki, Wurl, Gracenote, IRIS TV and KERV ai for their support.

Here’s what you missed in TVREV this week:

Tim Hanlon n explains why local TV news needs to move forward.

Alan Wolk suggests YouTube comes next after TV, and looks at the Omnicom/IPG merger in the Week in Review.

Eleanor Semeraro analyzes a new Inscape report, showing the shift to streaming only continued in 2024.

Brandon Katz helps us understand how despite having a smaller library, Apple TV+ still sees revenue increase… for now.

Trent Wheeler from Gracenote explains the value of a standardized taxonomy in the first Innovator Spotlight from our aforementioned contextual report.

NEW SPECIAL REPORT: The Contextual Revolution

The Contextual Revolution: Five Companies Rewriting The Rules of CTV Advertising.

There are companies who have spent years working to make contextual targeting happen and they are finally starting to get recognized for being the visionaries we know them to be.

In this report we will introduce you to five of them: Anoki, Gracenote, IRIS.TV, KERV.ai, and Wurl, all of whom have done remarkable work making the contextual ecosystem a reality.

In addition, we open the report with an in-depth TVREV overview of contextual targeting—what it is, what it can do and where and why it is gaining traction.

The best part of this report is that it is free, thanks to our five sponsors.

Download The Free Report