42% YoY growth in global ad spend on the SpotX platform
SpotX, the leading global video advertising platform, continued its profitable growth track-record and ended the year with both outstanding financial results and significantly more access to consumers.
As the pandemic raged across the globe, a record number of viewers tuned in to streaming TV in 2020, with four out of five consumers watching at least some ad-supported CTV programming. Advertisers took notice by diversifying their ad budgets and investing heavily in CTV with SpotX. Global ad spend on the SpotX platform grew 42% in 2020, driven primarily by over-the-top (OTT) clients who account for nearly 70% of overall ad spend today. Business continued to accelerate last year on a quarterly basis after COVID-19 initially impacted the second quarter, growing globally to 70% YoY in Q4. Although North America is still the largest market for SpotX, representing approximately 88% of overall ad spend in 2020, business in EMEA and APAC is accelerating at 107% and 66% year-over-year respectively, providing huge market opportunities for SpotX moving forward.
Notwithstanding the challenges of last year’s market conditions, increased global ad spend with SpotX translated to revenue growth for the company, in part due to strong new and expanded partnerships with several leading device manufacturers including LG, Roku, Samsung, TiVo, and VIZIO, and launched programmatic solutions to scale addressable TV in partnership with Project OAR, major pay TV distributors, and large ad tech and media companies including The Trade Desk and AMC Networks. These partnerships contributed to SpotX reaching more consumers than ever before with 70 million CTV households in the United States. This represents a 40% increase in household reach since May 2020 and a 67% increase since December 2019. In EMEA, SpotX now reaches 25 million CTV households which is approximately half of all ad-supported CTV households across France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
“We had a phenomenal 2020 with record revenues and our numbers prove that our early investment in CTV was a bold but intelligent strategic decision,” said Mike Shehan, Co-Founder and CEO at SpotX. “We achieved these results by continuing to strengthen our close relationships with media owners, device manufacturers, and advertisers. SpotX’s strong performance is proof that we are leading CTV experts.”
In 2020, SpotX also launched a solution with SpringServe called Total Connect+ that unifies direct and programmatic demand into a holistic ad decisioning process, helping media owners take more control over their video advertising businesses. Several publishers, including Crackle Plus and Redbox, are leveraging Total Connect+.
SpotX anticipates additional growth throughout 2021 due to more adoption of programmatic and addressable TV by media owners, driven primarily by the increase of streaming video consumption and advertisers wishing to connect with those consumers. The company does not project significant impact from forthcoming Google or Apple privacy changes because the majority of SpotX’s business lies within CTV and addressable TV where first-party audience data is paramount and cookies are not used.
In February, Magnite, the largest independent sell-side advertising platform, entered into a definitive agreement to acquire SpotX from RTL Group for $1.17 billion in cash and stock (based on the value of Magnite stock on the date of the announcement). The deal is expected to close in Q2 2021 subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions.