Who is available to reach?
In an AdExchanger column, Fromm argues that subscriber totals, monthly active users and platform reach help describe a streaming business but do not establish how much advertising inventory it can deliver. A large reported audience may include people who are absent throughout a campaign.
He distinguishes audience size, meaning everyone with access to a service, from audience availability, meaning those watching during the campaign. Addressability narrows that group further to viewers who can receive ads and whom buyers can bid to reach. Ghost audiences, by contrast, remain subscribed but watch little or nothing during a meaningful three-to-four-month campaign window.
Those distinctions become more consequential as buyers value inventory one impression at a time, Fromm says. He urges advertisers to ask media partners not just "How big is your audience?" but "How much of your audience is actually showing up?"
Months of inactivity behind the audience totals
Samsung Ads uses a specific definition for its ghost-user research: someone who used a streaming app within the past 12 months but was inactive for at least four consecutive months during that period. Its June 2026 State of CTV report found that, even at the largest apps, the number of ghost users was roughly half the number of active users in a quarter.
The company reports ghost viewership ranging from 50% at the most popular apps to more than 100% at long-tail services, where people who try an app and then disappear outnumber regular viewers. Samsung Ads also cites Antenna data indicating that churn offsets 89% of new streaming subscriptions.
Fromm attributes part of the problem to viewers following individual shows rather than maintaining loyalty to an app. Once a season finishes, they move on. He says the effect is less pronounced in free ad-supported streaming television, or FAST, where people can switch among channels and access a broad selection without paying for a subscription. Paying subscribers have a financial reason to cancel a service they no longer watch.
Research reported by Guideline's Media Monitor illustrates the challenge for original programming. Among the top 10 streaming originals in the first half of 2026, even the strongest performer drew just under 10% of its viewership from people who had not used the app in the preceding two months. People who arrived for a single show subsequently ghosted at five times the rate of existing viewers.
Samsung Ads also tracks the share of each app's audience that watches in at least 10 months of the year. By that measure, loyal viewers accounted for less than half the audience at 15 of the 20 leading streaming apps.
The NFL's seasonal audience
Football provides another example of the gap between attracting viewers and retaining their attention. Fromm says Samsung Ads recently found that two-thirds of new viewers who downloaded a streaming app for NFL games stopped watching the service after the season. Their churn rate was nearly double that of existing users.
Samsung Ads research shared by Fromm and reported by Guideline's Media Monitor examined the three apps that carried NFL games. In both the 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons, their user bases increased by about 25%, while monthly viewing time per viewer rose 60%. Comparing March with the September-to-December period, the research found 34% fewer users and a 63% decline in time spent per user.
An earlier Samsung Ads analysis, reported by MediaPost in August 2025, covered a different stated period and produced different figures. It used automatic content recognition, or ACR, screen data from Samsung smart "active" TV sets across the 12 months from Q2 2024 through Q2 2025.
In that dataset, NFL-season streaming viewership rose 28% between July-August 2024 and September-December 2024, and monthly hours per viewer increased 57%. By March 2025, viewership had fallen 33% and monthly hours per viewer had dropped 59%.
Ad-supported streaming draws more spending
The measurement question comes as advertising takes a larger role in streaming. Antenna puts ad-supported accounts at 48% of US premium subscription video-on-demand accounts in Q1 2026. Ad tiers represented 59% of subscriptions added that quarter. The US total for ad-supported premium SVOD subscriptions reached 110 million, compared with 53 million two years earlier.
Samsung Ads' June 2026 State of CTV report also documented the shift. Advertising supported three-quarters of streaming minutes, and 85% of Samsung households used at least one ad-supported streaming app. The report found a 57% decline in ad-free streaming since 2022.
The same report found that virtually all TV viewers now stream, while linear viewing is heavily concentrated: 22% of viewers account for 97% of the time spent watching linear TV.
CTV upfront spending overtook linear TV upfront spending for the first time in 2026. Omdia projects that worldwide CTV advertising revenue will reach $81 billion in 2030, up from $44 billion in 2025.
Viewing intelligence moves toward the seller
Fromm sees audience curation increasingly taking place on the sell side. Original equipment manufacturers, supply-side platforms and publishers are using deterministic viewing data and real-time signals to identify who is watching on the TV screen.
In his account, manufacturers and supply-side platforms are taking on an intelligence role beyond distributing inventory. Their viewing signals can help establish an impression's value before it enters an auction.
Fromm argues that the competitive advantage will belong to sellers that can identify a reachable audience when an impression becomes available, rather than simply claim the biggest audience overall. His proposed measure of streaming value combines reach with evidence that viewers are present.
