Why pop champagne when you can read about adtech news? Or, even better, pop your champagne while reading adtech news! (You’ll be the life of the party, we swear!)
Earlier this month, Yahoo DSP celebrated the one-year anniversary of its AI solutions suite, Yahoo Blueprint, with a blog post talking up the platform’s capabilities and its adoption. In a nutshell, Yahoo Blueprint sits within the Yahoo DSP and gives advertisers AI-powered tools and insights, like recommendations for campaign improvements, auto-optimization aligned to KPIs, and predictive data to identify likely customers.
The blog post also touched on an interesting challenge around the unpredictable nature of live sports ad inventory in CTV, which Yahoo addressed with an update to Yahoo Blueprint. According to the post:
“As more streaming platforms add live sports to their offerings, many holdouts may finally cut the cord. In fact, 70% of sports viewers are projected to watch sports digitally by 2025, equating to 114 million viewers.⁸ While this is an exciting opportunity, live sports and events can pose challenges for advertisers due to the millions of concurrent viewers, creating surges in unpredictable avails within the CTV bidstream. These surges can lead to audience overfrequency and cause advertisers to exhaust their budgets too early in the day while leaving publishers with valuable supply unfilled later in the event.”
Essentially, as games play out and people tune in, viewership spikes and unexpected increases in available ad slots occur. This can cause ads to run repeatedly, depleting budgets too quickly and leaving publishers with unsold inventory.
Yahoo says it helped to address the problem by enhancing its pacing algorithm in Yahoo Blueprint—the algo that manages how a campaign’s budget is distributed over time—“to respond to traffic spikes 10 times faster.” The update, Yahoo claims, helped buyers get better pacing and more precise delivery against their daily budgets.
Why This Matters:
More sports viewers are shifting to streaming, with digital live sports audiences now outpacing traditional pay TV viewers in the U.S. According to a November report from Emarketer, which Yahoo refers to in its blog post, about 105 million people watched live sports digitally in 2024, compared to nearly 86 million on traditional TV. This shift began in 2023, when digital live sports viewership surpassed traditional for the first time. The trend will continue in 2025, with Emarketer projecting 114 million digital live sports viewers, while traditional TV drops to 82 million.
As this happens, advertisers are spending more on live sports streaming. In September, 40% of marketers polled by The Trade Desk said they plan to increase their spending on open marketplace programmatic for sports on CTV this year, compared to 22% who said they would in 2023. This is also why streamers like Netflix and Amazon, for example, are racking up deals to feature live sports on their platforms. They understand the revenue opportunity that exists as viewership and ad dollars migrate over. (Though the fight for live sports content has created some confusing fragmentation for viewers and fans.)
Experts React:
Matt Barnes, VP of Programmatic Sales at Disney, was featured in Yahoo’s blog post and praised the updated pacing algorithm: “As more consumers flock to streaming for live programming and tentpole events – especially on properties like ESPN – these innovations and technological investments from Yahoo enable more effective real-time bidding against the unpredictability of live content while ensuring scalable reach and intentional connections with consumers, leading to higher fill rates and ultimately benefitting both our advertisers and viewers alike.”
Our Take:
Live sports viewership is set to rise quite a bit in 2025 and beyond, with spending continuing to follow. The focus now shifts to platforms, publishers, and streamers: How are they helping advertisers optimize their spending and provide greater transparency on metrics and campaign performance? What key challenges in live sports streaming still need to be addressed? In 2025, the conversation may evolve from “spend is heading to live sports streaming” to “the spend is here—how do we maximize its impact?”
