FAST is mainstream now, but platforms hiding their data are strangling its economics

Free ad-supported TV has the audience of a mainstream medium: ComScore reported 43% year-over-year growth in U.S. FAST viewing hours to 1.8 billion through August 2025, Amagi puts global growth at 55% through mid-2026, and eMarketer estimates 131 million U.S. FAST users this year, 54% of all CTV users. Session duration is up 25% year over year per Wurl. Yet revenue per viewing hour at some operators has collapsed from 18 cents to eight cents, and CPMs that were once $30 are approaching single digits. The cause is not oversupply, argues this VideoElephant column: platforms are sitting on the audience data that would validate the inventory and choosing not to share it, in one case arriving at a meeting with a printout they would not let anyone keep. The Nielsen Gauge only captures Tubi, Pluto TV and The Roku Channel because they aggregate at scale; other FAST channels do not register, not because they cannot be measured but because platforms will not allow it. Tastemade's Evan Bregman put the situation plainly at StreamTV: the industry is collectively leaving money on the table. The fix proposed is baseline device-level confirmation - on-the-glass delivery verification of content and ads, without person-level measurement - a standard the buy side should already expect.

The crux

FAST's audience is proven but its economics are being compressed by a transparency failure, not a demand failure - platforms hoard the data that would let buyers verify inventory, so agencies discount it, and the correction is independent device-level verification that is achievable now.

Sell-side read

For any publisher running FAST channels, the immediate leverage is to push for device-level delivery verification: provable on-the-glass delivery is the difference between single-digit CPMs and recovered yield, because buyers are discounting what they cannot independently confirm.

Watch

whether a platform breaks ranks and opens device-level data to a third-party verifier - the first mover would reset the category's CPM floor.