FuboTV expects to surpass $1 billion in revenue this year. As the company pursues that goal, it wouldn’t hurt to grow its share of the advertising market.
As it stands, advertising only accounted for $73.7 million of fuboTV’s $638 million total revenue in 2021. Indeed, subscription revenue will still account for the bulk of the company’s 2022 revenue—particularly if new price increase tests work out. But fuboTV now sounds like it’s beginning to put a more concerted effort behind growing its advertising business, which will help push the total past $1 billion.
FuboTV has been watching it total viewing time tick up over the past few years and CEO David Gandler said that if the company can add another 15 to 20 hours of network viewership where fuboTV has more compelling ad inventory share, it should result in higher advertising revenue.
During the BMO Digital Advertising Summit, Gandler said much of his company’s focus so far has been on growing the subscriber base, which has helped fuboTV grow its CPMs at a 5% rate annually. He said CPMs will also benefit from fuboTV’s upcoming addition of header bidding, which will allow the platform to call all advertisers simultaneously to see who will take the highest rate. Once header bidding is up and running, fuboTV will shift its attention to ad pod optimization.
“I believe I’ve mentioned the power of selling 15-second ads versus 30-second ads. What we’ve found is that the rate on the 15s is roughly 15% less than what it is on the 30s. So, being able to very quickly manage our ability to optimize for 15s, we think is also going to have a material impact on our ad revenue,” he said.
While header bidding and ad pod optimization are in the works, fuboTV is setting partnerships with LiveRamp for segmentation and dentsu’s M1, which allows advertisers to layer in their CRM data with fubo’s first-party data to find audience matches.
FuboTV has only really been talking about ads for around 16 months and back then it had only six people on its advertising team. Now that figure is up to 18 and the company is finally looking to expand its ad sales team.
“We still have a lot of hiring to do. We’re not getting to all the agencies we want to get to quickly enough but, again, the focus right now is to make sure we have the ad tech in place so when the advertisers come, we’ll be able to really deliver,” Gandler said.