The story. CTV’s early years ran on scarcity — a small pool of inventory and buying paths let publishers hold high CPMs. Nine industry leaders surveyed on where CTV pricing power sits today mostly land on the same split verdict: the market overall is tilting toward buyers, but premium, live and fan-driven inventory hasn’t lost its seller leverage at all.
01What happened
- The consensus direction. dentsu UK&I’s Alexandra Sturgess: “CTV is increasingly shifting from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market,” driven by ecosystem diversification and programmatic platforms that let buyers optimize in real time with granular targeting. (VideoWeek, 14 September 2026)
- The split-verdict framing. Mindshare’s Dave Sargent calls it “Both” — CTV viewing keeps growing while distribution channels keep multiplying, so more supplier choice keeps pricing competitive even as demand rises. Titan OS’s Joe Evea: a buyer’s market “but only in aggregate” — interchangeable, lower-quality inventory is under seller pressure while TV-OS gatekeeping still creates distinct, defensible ad opportunities.
- Where sellers still hold the line. BBC Studios’ Lindsay Turner: overall inventory is abundant, but “premium attention is still a seller’s market” — distinctive, fan-driven content remains genuinely scarce. Nutcake’s Polly Hibbert makes the same split: audiences move fluidly across TV, streaming, YouTube and social, but premium live content and cultural moments hold their value.
- The unambiguous read. Bloomberg Media’s David Bradford: the 2026 landscape is “quite clear” as a buyer’s market overall — though premium sellers still keep the advantage when they can deliver genuinely engaged audiences.
02What it means inside a GAM network
CTV programmatic supply dynamics are shifting publisher floor/yield strategy and buyer acquisition cost calculus simultaneously — how GAM/AdX CTV operators should read inventory pressure vs. pricing power in the next 18 months.
Nine buy-side and sell-side voices converging on “both markets are true at once, sorted by inventory tier” is itself the operator signal: pricing power in CTV is no longer set by the format, it’s set by where a given slot sits on the scarcity curve. That means a flat CTV floor strategy — one CPM target across a whole video inventory pool — is now mispricing both ends. Interchangeable inventory that’s abundant will get bid down toward buyer-market pricing regardless of what the floor says; premium, live or fan-driven placements that are still genuinely scarce are being left on the table if they’re priced at the same aggregate rate as everything else.
03What publishers should do about it
04The bottom line
Nine operators from both sides of the CTV table landed on the same nuanced answer: the aggregate market has tipped toward buyers as supply and distribution options multiplied, but premium and fan-driven inventory hasn’t lost a bit of its scarcity value. The publishers who will feel this as a revenue problem are the ones still running one CTV floor strategy across an inventory pool that now has two very different markets sitting inside it.