As CTV advertising evolves, here’s what it can learn from the $200B paid search model

I first shared this piece in Streaming Media, and the response pointed to some meaningful shifts happening in our industry. With new trends already emerging for the year ahead, it’s worth revisiting with a renewed lens.

In recent years, consumers have drastically shifted the bulk of their purchasing habits to online. In response, brands and advertisers have had to pivot their business models to reach those digitally reliant consumers. Companies also have to grapple with getting the attention of consumers who are constantly plugged into content on digital devices.

As of 2025, a vast majority of U.S. households now stream TV, effectively making CTV a universal reach vehicle. And while marketers have always intuitively grasped television’s ability to influence sales, the arena has been historically dominated by a handful of advertisers who could afford the medium’s high cost-of-entry and smaller businesses have been forced to sit on the sidelines.

CTV advertising spend is expected to reach $46.8B by 2028, driven by accelerating investment across performance marketers. That number is only forecast to grow as digital-first advertisers shift budgets into measurable, outcome-driven TV. Marketers of all sizes have before them a unique opportunity to capitalize on this evolving format.

But before they do that, it’s important to take a look at where innovation currently lies within CTV advertising, where it has room to grow, and how marketers of all sizes can find their place in the medium. Ironically, it’s likely going to require the industry to think back to the early days of paid search — and apply some of those same market principles to today’s formats — to usher in the renaissance of CTV advertising.

Where we are as an industry

Historically, television was not inclusive of smaller brands, and measurement of its effectiveness has always been elusive since it is not “clickable.” It was anchored in 1:1 sales processes, expensive ad buys, and notoriously poor measurement and attribution.

As a result, the roughly $75 billion TV market was long dominated by 500 advertisers who drove the vast majority of TV ad spend. Largely because of that, the market stagnated while performance-based digital media, with its sophisticated approaches to precision ROI, saw virtually unimpeded growth, and now accounts for hundreds of billions in annual spend.

This legacy model has been undergoing a fundamental shift. The rise of CTV has opened the door for a much broader set of marketers. What once excluded most advertisers is evolving into a performance channel accessible to companies of all sizes.

An important look back to understand how we got here

For the last 20 years, as consumers have spent more time online, ecommerce has exploded. And the key driver of online commerce is a concept that was introduced 25 years ago by marketing visionary Bill Gross in an Internet incubator in Pasadena, California. The advent of this revolutionary model would forever impact how goods and services were sold.

From today’s vantage point, his thought process behind this at-the-time startling innovation was fairly straightforward: What if consumers could identify people who already had a need for or an interest in something and put a relevant ad in front of them at the exact moment when they expressed it? And what if media were sold in an automated marketplace, where any marketer could reach a global audience instead of just a few hundred people?

This marketplace model was first implemented in Bill’s paid search engine, GoTo.com, which launched in 1997 and generated quick adoption by enabling millions of businesses to advertise to mass audiences. And that was just for starters — the marketplace model ultimately led to the re-invention of all digital media, from paid search (Yahoo, Google, Bing) to social media (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) to display and video advertising (Yahoo, The Trade Desk, etc.), as well as new categories including ride sharing (Uber), food delivery (Instacart), event tickets (StubHub), real estate (Realtor.com) and property rentals (Airbnb). Today, millions of businesses participate in digital marketplaces like Google and Facebook, spending hundreds of billions annually.

History repeats itself: The old must marry the new to advance

As digital advertising continues to evolve, the next question becomes: how can marketers extend performance principles into television?

Streaming TV is quickly becoming the dominant way consumers watch TV: today there are 100M+ U.S. streaming households, and global CTV device penetration continues to climb rapidly. This trend will only accelerate. And to reach these consumers, advertisers are flocking to TV in record numbers, enabled by search-like, self-managed CTV buying and measurement consoles that can measure actual business outcomes (e.g., website visitors and sales) and ROI that result from TV ad viewing on a deterministic basis. 

Recent findings from tvScientific’s upcoming State of Performance TV 2026 report show that marketers rank CTV as effective as social media, with many reallocating spend from Google, Meta, and TikTok into measurable Performance TV campaigns. Digital-first marketers that move to TV will usher in a new renaissance period of television advertising, benefiting content producers and consumers. And it starts today.