FreeWheel today published its 1H 2026 Video Monetization Report, which shows programmatic ad views on its platform growing 25% in the United States and 44% in Europe year on year, about twice the pace of total streaming ad views in each region.

In Short

FreeWheel, a company that runs ad technology for video, released numbers from its own systems showing that ads sold through automated buying grew about twice as fast as all streaming ads in the US and 14 European countries during the first half of 2026. It matters to advertisers and publishers because it shows how quickly streaming ad sales are moving into automated systems, and how different that shift looks in Europe, where most automated deals are guaranteed, compared with the US, where most are not. The report has no prices or revenue figures, so it shows where ads run and how they are sold, not what they earn.

What the report measures

The report compares the first half of 2026 with the first half of 2025. It covers the United States and 14 European countries - Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom - and counts ad views, which its glossary defines as occurring "each time an ad is displayed". According to FreeWheel, the underlying data is "based on aggregated advertising data collected through the FreeWheel platform" and forms "one of the largest available on the usage and monetization of professional, rights-managed ad-supported video content worldwide". Three members of FreeWheel's Advisory Services team wrote it: Brandt Plomaritis, Hifza Rahim and Adam Twyman.

Two definitions shape every chart. The "live" category includes FAST channels, because ad requests for those channels set "mode = live" in the ad server, and linear addressable television is excluded. Several charts also carry the warning that "U.S. and EUR ad view data sets are not equivalent in size", and the report gives no absolute volume for either region. Regional comparisons therefore rest on rates and shares alone.

The back page of the report lists the previous edition, for the second half of 2025, as the Video Marketplace Report; this one is titled Video Monetization Report. Despite the name, no CPM, fill rate or revenue figure appears anywhere in its 20 numbered pages. What it offers are growth rates, shares and one set of ad completion figures.

Streaming ad views: growth by region and device

Total streaming ad views grew 12% in the US and 20% in Europe between the two half-years, and 13% across both regions combined, according to FreeWheel. The company ties the increase to adoption: 89% of US viewers and 85% of European viewers now subscribe to at least one ad-supported service, figures it sources to its own Voice of the Viewer studies. PPC Land covered the US edition of that study in June, which reported that 89% of paid streaming subscribers use at least one service carrying advertising.

Live programming holds the majority of US delivery. It made up 57% of US ad views, leaving 43% for video on demand; in Europe live stood at 32% against 68% for VOD, and the European live share grew 8% year on year. Within VOD, long-form content of five minutes or longer accounted for 95% of US views and 97% of European ones. PPC Land's coverage of the 2H 2025 edition recorded the same 57% live share for the US and a long-form split of 91% to 9%, but defined short-form as video under six minutes. The new edition draws the line at five, so the two splits do not rest on identical definitions.

Device mix barely moved in the US. Connected TV carried 86% of ad views, matching the share recorded for the previous half-year, with mobile at 8%, set-top box video on demand at 3% and desktop at 3%. Europe looks different: CTV at 53%, mobile at 24%, set-top box VOD at 16% and desktop at 7%. The report says both regions saw CTV's share grow year on year, while mobile and set-top box options "remained more prevalent" in Europe. CTV ad views themselves rose 15% in the US and 33% in Europe; the US rate compares with the 11% recorded for 2H 2025.

Adding the CTV and set-top box shares gives a television-screen share of 89% in the US and 69% in Europe. Eight years earlier, FreeWheel's Q2 2018 report put that share at 57% in the US and 30% in Europe, measured as set-top box VOD plus over-the-top devices. Country coverage and device definitions may differ between the editions, so the comparison is indicative rather than exact.

Programmatic: faster growth, different mixes

Programmatic ad views grew 25% in the US and 44% in Europe. Unique advertisers delivering programmatically rose 25% across both regions combined, while ad views from those advertisers rose 24%. FreeWheel reads the pair as "a trend of broader access to inventory for a wider range of buyers", and names small and medium-sized businesses as the group publishers can reach through simpler buying and reliable performance metrics.

Programmatic delivery accounts for 34% of total ad views in the US and 22% in Europe, shares that the report says rose 4% and 3% over the year. Guaranteed deals gained 7% in share in the US and 8% in Europe. Whether those changes are percentage points or relative moves is not stated, and the distinction matters when the base is a third of the market.

Deal type separates the regions most sharply. Of programmatic ad views, 27% in the US were guaranteed deals, against 71% in Europe. The glossary describes such deals as "a transaction priority that ensures available supply by guaranteeing purchase of a set number of impressions", and the chart notes classify a deal as guaranteed when its "deal type includes Programmatic Direct". All other programmatic deal types count as non-guaranteed. Why the split? The report does not say.

One data point from PPC Land's archive points in the same direction. On June 22, 2026, Channel 4 opened its video-on-demand inventory to five demand-side platforms, among them FreeWheel Buyer Cloud, with programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals on offer through Amazon DSP. A UK broadcaster selling reserved inventory through programmatic pipes fits the European pattern, although the report draws no such link.

Devices differ within programmatic too. In the US, CTV carried 92% of programmatic impressions, up 10% year on year, with mobile at 6% and desktop at 2%; programmatic set-top box VOD in the US is below 0.5%. In Europe, CTV carried 39% of programmatic impressions, up 9%, while set-top box VOD held 28%, mobile 25% and desktop 8%. More than a quarter of European programmatic impressions therefore run on a device category that barely registers in US programmatic.

The gap to earlier years is wide. FreeWheel's Q2 2018 report put programmatic at 14% of total ad views, up 58% year on year, according to the same PPC Land coverage. The current definition covers Programmatic, Marketplace Platform Exchange and the programmatic side of Marketplace Platform Private, so the 2018 and 2026 figures may not measure the same set of transactions.

The section closes with a nod to agentic AI and to MCP, which the glossary describes as "a standardized framework which facilitates communication between different AI systems". FreeWheel says industry leaders "increasingly point to established programmatic standards" of that kind as the foundation for automated collaboration, citing an AdExchanger article by Anthony Katsur. The company released its own MCP server on March 11, 2026, with PMG as the first partner to pilot it.

Signals: metadata, identity and context

Customized metadata

Customized metadata lets a seller pass extra key-and-value pairs inside bid requests, and the report charts how often each key appears. The base is narrow by construction. Percentages divide items carrying a given value by items carrying "any customized metadata value(s)", so they describe the enriched slice of supply, not supply as a whole. The report does not say how large that slice is.

In the US, the most common site-side values were AppBundle (59%), AppStoreUrl (55%) and AppName (50%). On the video side, Genre led with 66%, followed by SeriesTitle at 36%, with ParentCategory and ContentRating at 29% each. European supply shows another profile. DeviceType appeared in 94% of enriched site-side items, with AppName and AppBundle at 75% each; on the video side, ContentTitle (50%) and ContentLanguage (48%) ranked above Genre (38%). FreeWheel attributes the difference in part to Europe being "more evenly distributed in its device usage".

The report says such signals bring "higher confidence in inventory quality, greater CPM lifts for publishers" and "better alignment between programming and the ad experience". The CPM claim carries a footnote pointing to FreeWheel's internal bid-stream data for US in-stream video auctions, "based on billions of bids", from March 2026. No lift figure is published.

Outside analysis suggests the wider market has less to work with. A Peer39 analysis from March 2026, cited in PPC Land's report on Wurl's content tagging, found that only 40% of CTV bid requests carried usable program-level content signals. On September 21, PPC Land reported on a Pixalate pre-bid API, in private beta for US traffic, that writes title, series, genre and content rating into the Content object of a bid request. FreeWheel's percentages measure a different thing - shares within enriched supply - and cannot be set directly against Peer39's figure.

Audience targeting and identity

Ad views associated with targeted audiences increased 5% in the US and 11% in Europe. Demographic targeting held a slight majority of the targeted share in both regions, at 53% in the US and 59% in Europe, with behavioral targeting at 47% and 41%. The section is titled "Universal IDs lead to enriched supply and more accurate targeting", yet it publishes no figure on identifier coverage, match rates or accuracy. If the growth rates are measured like the totals cited earlier (12% and 20%), targeted ad views grew more slowly than delivery as a whole in both regions. The report does not comment on that.

A callout covers retail media networks, saying that data-signal collaborations with ad-serving technology offer "real-time matching of viewer preferences to relevant demand via specific programming types". The report's source list cites Amazon Ads and PPC Land's own article on the subject. The underlying development is Amazon Publisher Cloud's Outcome Optimizer, added on June 19, 2026, which applies Amazon's shopping, browsing and streaming signals to programmatic guaranteed deals inside FreeWheel's ad server. Warner Bros. Discovery and A+E Global Media joined the first phase. Amazon's own testing put the lift in on-target reach at 33%, without a disclosed sample size.

Contextual targeting

The report's headline contextual claim is that "contextual ad views grew by nearly 6 times (5.8x) the rate of overall ad views during the past year for publishers actively utilizing contextual solutions". The measure covers a sub-group only: total ad views delivered through publishers using contextual targeting. FreeWheel concedes that contextual remains "a small piece of the delivery pie" and gives no base. Applying the 5.8 ratio to the combined 13% growth would imply roughly 75%, but the report does not say whether the comparison uses the sub-group's own overall growth or the whole data set, so that arithmetic is unreliable.

On the technology, the report says AI-powered tools "capture visual and text-based signals from vast libraries of video content and convert that input into usable segments for buyers". It also cites a FreeWheel study finding that 60% of buyers believe AI improves contextual targeting. PPC Land covered that study on September 5; one of its surveys covered 226 media buyers and 50 media sellers in April 2026.

Completion rates

Average completion rates for pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll ads were 94%, 98% and 91% across the US and Europe combined. The figures come from a sub-group of the data: total delivery on Roku, Samsung TV and Amazon Fire TV, which the report names as the three most popular CTV sub-devices. FreeWheel reads them as evidence of "strong viewer retention and satisfaction across streaming environments", crediting "access to premium content and lighter ad loads".

Interpretation is contested. On June 29, PPC Land reported an argument by a paid media consultant that non-skippable streaming formats hold completion near 98% regardless of inventory quality - the level at which the mid-roll figure sits. Two months later, PPC Land traced the 94% long-form completion figure that the Video Advertising Bureau circulated by email on August 28 to a September 2023 FreeWheel study. The new report defines neither the denominator nor the share of inventory that can be skipped.

Where the data stops

Several limits follow from how the report is built.

  • The two regional data sets differ in size, and no volumes are published.
  • Changes in share are written with a plus sign and a percentage, without saying whether they are points or relative changes.
  • The +24% growth in ad views from programmatic advertisers sits below both regional programmatic growth rates (25% and 44%). A combined figure covering the same views could not fall below both, so the measures presumably cover different sets of views. The report does not explain the difference.
  • The completion-rate and contextual charts rest on sub-groups whose size is not disclosed.
  • Claims of CPM gains from metadata are not quantified.
  • Two pages, the CTV growth page and the conclusion, carry the notice "This content was created in whole, or in part, using artificial intelligence", with no indication of which parts.

The report is also published by a vendor whose ad-serving and marketplace products generate the data, and it offers no independent audit of the figures.

Why the figures matter to buyers and sellers

The report draws on ad-server data from two regions at once, and the market it sketches has three features: programmatic growing about twice as fast as total delivery, a European programmatic market that is smaller than its US counterpart (22% of ad views against 34%) but expanding faster and built mainly on guaranteed deals, and a US market where CTV already carries 86% of delivery.

Those numbers sit beside unresolved measurement questions that PPC Land has followed through the year. Content signals in bid requests remain patchy, completion rates are read differently by sellers and skeptical buyers, and retail data is moving into deal optimization with results reported by the party that supplies the data. FreeWheel's report adds volume to the discussion without settling any of these points, since the enriched share of supply, the completion-rate denominators and the contextual baseline are all left undisclosed.

Agentic buying is the other thread. Both the report and the March MCP release point toward AI agents working inside ad-server and marketplace workflows. How that plays out where guaranteed deals dominate programmatic in Europe and non-guaranteed deals dominate in the US is a question the report leaves open.

Timeline

Summary

Who: FreeWheel, which the report describes as a Comcast company. Brandt Plomaritis, Hifza Rahim and Adam Twyman of FreeWheel's Advisory Services team wrote the report.

What: The 1H 2026 Video Monetization Report. It records total streaming ad view growth of 12% in the US and 20% in Europe, programmatic growth of 25% and 44%, a 27% guaranteed share of US programmatic ad views against 71% in Europe, completion rates of 94%, 98% and 91% by ad position, and a contextual growth ratio of 5.8x. It contains no price or revenue data.

When: Published today. It compares January to June 2026 with the same period of 2025.

Where: The United States and 14 European countries: Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Why: FreeWheel says the report "highlights the changing dynamics of how enterprise-class content owners and distributors are monetizing premium digital video content". For the trade, it supplies benchmark shares and growth rates for programmatic sales, device mix, targeting signals and completion, though several of its measures rest on undisclosed sub-groups or bases.