Ad Views Up Roku & Fire TV Share Down 2nd Half of Last Year
Streaming from connected devices is more popular than ever, with more viewers than ever tuning in.
Media Post is reporting that the total number of ads viewed on premium streamed content in the second half of 2021 increased a whopping 45% from the same period in the previous year.
The bad news for Roku and Fire TV is that they both lost market share from the year prior. Roku still had a bigger piece of the streaming pie at 39% vs Fire TV at 26%. But both these devices lost market share in 2021 from the same period in 2020. Roku decreased 4 percent from 43%, and Fire TV decreased 3 percentage points from 29%.
Why the Decrease for Two of Today's Most Popular Streamers?
Partially, one reason Roku lost market share was that many cord cutters are now using smart TVs instead of connected box top devices. The technology in today's smart TVs has matured. Especially Android TV, which many are choosing now that both Amazon and Roku started heavily censoring content and apps on their devices.
Android is a lot like a PC and it allows sideloading any app directly instead of only allowing censored content to be added from their Channel Store. Fire TV runs a form of Android, and while sideloading is possible. Amazon recently clamped down on 3rd party launchers and no longer allows them to be sideloaded onto a Fire TV. Other apps can still be sideloaded for now.
Roku also became much more restricted on the content allowed on their platform. With the recent elimination of sideloaded channels. But this just happened in February 2022, so this really did not have any effect last year. But it remains to be seen what kind of effect if any this move will have next quarter. Roku did have some buggy software updates and other hardware issues last year which could have caused some viewers to try alternative streaming platforms instead.
Most Streamed Content For Ad Views
One of the most interesting observations is the type of content that generated the most ad views last year. It was not Sports at 4% or News at 65 as they were quite a bit lower than premium entertainment content. This generated the highest percentage of ad views by far at a whopping 90% of ad views. As more people choose to cut ties with big cable, these numbers will most likely keep rising higher.
For Uncensored Content Join Minds instead of Facebook
Facebook is another company that has continued to lose market share due to its heavy-handed tactics. Closing groups with thousands of members and pages with thousands of likes with no warnings is a stupid business. Many users have already left the platform in favor of other less restrictive social media sites like Minds.
The Minds social media platform is designed to look and work very similar to Facebook, minus the constant censoring and privacy abuse Facebook is guilty of. Even their stock has tanked, and Europe is about to get heavy-handed on them and other big tech companies. They could be facing huge fines there for some of its ongoing practices. With the number of users leaving Facebook, it's only a matter of time before Facebook becomes just another Social Media Dinosaur like MySpace.
