Simulmedia published a title-level analysis on July 28, 2026 arguing that Netflix's decision to open ad inventory on The Trade Desk without spend minimums enlarges demand for an audience that is barely growing, with 89% of comparable returning seasons drawing fewer views than the season before them.

Eight days after Netflix inventory became buyable by every advertiser on The Trade Desk's Sellers and Publishers 500+ marketplace, a competing television company published a set of numbers that complicate the story around it. The analysis, written by Simulmedia chief executive Dave Morgan and posted on the company blog on July 28, 2026, does not dispute that the marketplace change matters. It disputes what the change can accomplish.

According to the Simulmedia post, the July 20, 2026 marketplace addition removed the private-deal requirement and the spend minimums that had previously gated access to Netflix advertising inventory, making inventory that ranked among the most exclusive in streaming buyable through ordinary programmatic workflows across more than 250 million monthly ad-supported viewers. Morgan describes the move as commercially sound and unsurprising, noting that connected television has erased the operating distinction between digital and television buying, and that performance buyers now expect self-serve access with no minimums on systems they already operate.

What follows in the post is the argument that gives it weight. Open access, on this reading, is a demand-side instrument. It brings more buyers to an audience. It does not bring more audience.

The dataset behind the claim

Simulmedia says it analysed every title in every edition of Netflix's "What We Watched" engagement report from the first half of 2023 through the first half of 2026. Across that period, according to the company, total viewing rose 4.5%, from 93.5 billion hours to 97.7 billion hours. Over the same stretch, the ad-supported tier passed 250 million monthly viewers and total subscriptions continued to climb.

The arithmetic implied by those two figures is the point. More members and more buyers are dividing what is, in aggregate, close to the same pool of watched hours.

The series-level detail is sharper. Simulmedia identified 73 series where consecutive seasons could be compared on equal footing. Of those, 89% drew fewer views than the preceding season. The median returning series came back 28% smaller. Nearly one in five lost at least half of the audience it had held.

Premiere windows tell the same story

Netflix's weekly global Top 10 data, measured on matched timeframes, produces the same shape according to the analysis. Beef opened its second season down 58%. The live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender opened its return down 59%. The Night Agent has fallen at every reappearance: 20.6 million views at the first premiere, then 13.9 million, then 8.4 million, a cumulative decline of roughly 59% across three season openings.

Each of those titles arrived with a large first-season audience. The erosion happens at the return, which Morgan identifies as the precise moment that tune-in marketing exists to address.

The distinction he draws is between content quality and audience recall. "This is not a programming problem. It is a tune-in problem," the post states. Netflix has assembled more subscribers than any competitor in streaming, according to Morgan, but has never had a structural reason to bring viewers back to one specific title. Under a subscription model, the identity of what a member watched was commercially irrelevant. Under an advertising model, it is the product.

The consequence, as the post frames it, is direct: an advertiser pays for people watching, so every viewer who skips a returning season is revenue that does not arrive.

What the marketplace change does and does not reach

The mechanics of the July 20 change were narrow. Before it, advertisers seeking Netflix placements through The Trade Desk had two routes: programmatic guaranteed deals with volume and price fixed in advance, or one-to-one private marketplace arrangements negotiated between buyer and seller. Both required direct engagement and, in practice, scale commitments that smaller advertisers could not meet. The marketplace addition replaced that gated structure with always-on deals reachable inside existing campaign controls.

Simulmedia's objection is not to the plumbing. It is to what the plumbing carries. Media businesses, the post argues, sell consumer contact, and without that contact there is nothing to sell repeatedly to companies that need to move product every day. Programmatic opening increases the number of bidders competing for Netflix's existing contact. It does not manufacture additional contact.

There is a second constraint the post raises, and it is one the industry has largely discussed in passing. Much Netflix viewing remains ad-free or ad-light, because the majority of the member base sits on plans without advertising. The volume of impressions actually available to advertisers is therefore a fraction of what the headline subscriber count implies. The 250 million figure describes monthly ad-supported reach, not total watched hours available for monetisation.

Netflix's own disclosures run in a similar direction

The engagement trend Simulmedia describes is broadly consistent with figures Netflix itself has put in front of investors. The company reported that viewing hours rose 2% year over year in the first half of 2026, to roughly 97 billion hours, an increment of about 1.5 billion hours against the same period a year earlier. That was a marginal acceleration on the 1.5% recorded across the whole of 2025. In the second half of 2025, Netflix reported 96 billion viewing hours, also up 2%, with growth in originals partly offset by declining consumption of licensed second-run content.

Set against that, the commercial expansion has been steep. Netflix has told investors it expects advertising revenue of approximately $3 billion in 2026, roughly double the figure booked in 2025. In the first quarter of 2026 the company confirmed more than 4,000 active advertisers, a 70% year-over-year increase, and said programmatic buying was on track to exceed half of its non-live advertising business.

The disclosure environment is also narrowing. The engagement report covering the first half of 2026 is the last Netflix will publish on a twice-yearly schedule. From 2027 the report moves to a single annual release in the first quarter, separated from earnings. The company had already stopped reporting quarterly subscriber counts in early 2025. That matters for the kind of analysis Simulmedia performed, because the dataset that permits outside season-over-season comparison will refresh half as often.

Three years of building the buying side

The programmatic architecture around Netflix has been assembled continuously since the ad tier launched in November 2022. Netflix opened its inventory to The Trade Desk, Google DV360 and Magnite in May 2024, joining Microsoft as its initial programmatic partners. Trade Desk buying reached Japan in June 2025 with first-party data integration and placement targeting inside Top 10 content. Amazon DSP arrived as the fifth major partner from the fourth quarter of 2025across 11 markets.

In March 2026 the company added Amazon Audiences, deterministic Yahoo DSP signals and its own Conversion API, closing gaps in attribution that performance buyers had flagged. Attention measurement followed through a Lumen Research integration in five European markets. At its 2026 upfront on May 13, Netflix put ad-plan reach at 250 million monthly active viewers and outlined AI agents capable of managing and purchasing campaigns, alongside expansion into 15 new advertising markets from 2027.

Every one of those steps addressed a layer of the buying stack: access, targeting, measurement, attribution, automation. None of them addressed the question Simulmedia raises, which concerns the size of the audience being bought rather than the ease of buying it.

The pattern is not confined to Netflix. Samsung opened Smart TV home screens to programmatic buying through The Trade Desk and Google DV360 in June 2026, continuing a sequence in which previously hard-to-reach premium surfaces are connected to demand-side infrastructure buyers already run.

The commercial position behind the analysis

Morgan's argument arrives with a commercial interest attached, and the post states it plainly. Simulmedia runs tune-in campaigns for television networks and streamers promoting their own programming, identifying likely viewers, reaching them on linear television at scale, and measuring conversion. The closing passage of the post is an explicit pitch: Netflix now sells like television, the rest of streaming is moving the same way, and audience growth will require television-style marketing.

That does not invalidate the underlying figures, which are drawn from Netflix's own published engagement reports and Top 10 tables and can be independently checked. It does mean the prescription and the diagnosis come from the same source.

Morgan founded and ran TACODA, an online advertising company acquired by AOL in 2007 for $275 million, and Real Media, a predecessor of 24/7 Real Media that was later sold to WPP for $649 million. He subsequently served as executive vice president for global advertising strategy at AOL. The analysis cites Netflix engagement reports, the Netflix weekly global Top 10, The Trade Desk marketplace announcement and eMarketer as its sources.

The piece circulated among media marketing executives after publication. Todd Ames, a senior marketing executive working in media, entertainment and cultural organisations, reposted Morgan's framing on LinkedIn, reproducing the tune-in formulation verbatim.

Why the argument matters to media buyers

For advertisers, the practical question is what the open marketplace actually delivers. Frequency management sits at the centre of it. If a fixed pool of watched hours absorbs a larger number of bidders, the likely outcomes are upward pressure on clearing prices, higher exposure frequency against the same households, or both. Neither is visible in an announcement about removed spend minimums.

The Trade Desk announcement carried no pricing detail, no disclosure of how marketplace inventory prices against private-deal equivalents, and no data on impression volume moving through the always-on channel. Media buyers assessing the change are working without the numbers that would let them model it.

For streaming platforms, the analysis identifies a category of marketing spend that the subscription era made unnecessary. Tune-in advertising, the practice of promoting a specific programme return to a specific audience, was a fixture of network television economics for decades and largely absent from subscription streaming. If advertising revenue becomes the marginal growth engine, the value of a returning viewer changes, and so does the case for spending to secure one.

For the broader connected television market, the Simulmedia figures supply something rare: a season-over-season audience series constructed from a platform's own disclosures rather than panel estimates. The reporting cadence change makes that construction harder from 2027 onward.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Simulmedia, a television advertising company, and its chief executive Dave Morgan, addressing Netflix, The Trade Desk, and the advertisers buying streaming inventory through them.

What: An analysis of every title in Netflix's What We Watched engagement reports from the first half of 2023 to the first half of 2026, finding that total viewing grew 4.5% to 97.7 billion hours while 89% of 73 comparable returning series drew fewer views than their preceding season, with a median decline of 28% and nearly one in five losing at least half their audience.

When: Published on July 28, 2026, eight days after The Trade Desk added Netflix inventory to its Sellers and Publishers 500+ marketplace on July 20, 2026.

Where: On the Simulmedia company blog, with the underlying data drawn from Netflix's published engagement reports and its weekly global Top 10 tables, and subsequently recirculated on LinkedIn.

Why: Removing spend minimums and private-deal requirements increases the number of advertisers competing for Netflix inventory without increasing the hours of viewing available to them, which raises unresolved questions about clearing prices, frequency, and how a streaming service converts subscriber scale into repeat viewership once advertising rather than subscription revenue sets the value of an individual returning viewer.