SpotX has revealed that ad spending on its platform for OTT inventory increased by 18x for the 12 months ending October 2017. SpotX defines OTT inventory as including broadcast-quality inventory from TV networks, pay-TV operators and other live, linear and VOD streaming services delivered via connected TVs, desktop and mobile. SpotX said the portion of ad budgets spent on OTT inventory increased from 8% in Oct. ’16 to 26% in Oct. ’17, with 30% expected by end of the year.

SpotX said that over 65 different demand side platforms buy ads with SpotX’s platform, but it called out 5 of them - Adobe Advertising Cloud, dataxu, The Trade Desk, VideoAmp and ZypMedia as the top DSPs for OTT inventory. For these 5, SpotX said daily spend on OTT has increased over 675% since January.

SpotX’s ad spending data builds on larger trends around the consumption of premium video on connected TVs. As adoption of CTVs has soared and more ad-supported apps with premium content have become available, the percentage of ad-supported viewing has increased and the percentage of ad-free SVOD consumption on these devices has declined.

For example, whereas not long ago using a Roku to watch Netflix was predominant, now Roku is seeing its fastest consumption growth happening with ad-supported video. This in turn translates to huge inventory increases and therefore more ad spending. With connected TVs poised to be a very popular holiday gift, these trends are almost certain to continue into 2018.