Unlocking Growth in Streaming: Why Demand Diversification Is Key for Media Owners

While scarcity and high demand for premium CTV inventory create strong monetization potential, it also raises the stakes of who is buying and how they access your supply. Relying on a narrow set of buyers or activation channels can expose publishers to shifts in buyer priorities, seasonal fluctuations, and changing supply path preferences. The most resilient streaming businesses maintain a balanced mix of demand across sources, ad formats, and verticals, optimizing each impression.

Innovative Ad Formats That Attract Demand

Publishers must support a broad set of buyer needs to maximize addressability and competitiveness and attract diverse demand. This includes different deal types (e.g., direct, programmatic guaranteed), curated marketplaces, and flexible audience targeting options. 

Increasingly, demand diversity also relies upon adopting new innovative ad formats that attract incremental demand and create new monetization moments through elements of discovery and engagement in the viewer experience.

• Home Screen and Tiles are dynamic, interactive visual units that appear within a streaming platform’s user interface, often in content carousels or recommendation feeds. They encourage discovery-based user engagement with high-impact visuals in a lean-back environment where audiences are already browsing and receptive.

• Pause Ads appear when viewers intentionally pause a piece of content, offering a non-intrusive, brand-safe canvas for advertising. According to MAGNA/Directv, 67% of Gen Z, 67% of millennials, 63% of Gen X, and 60% of Baby Boomers all prefer pause ads to frozen screens. As a result, pause ads can deliver viewable impressions in a moment of high attention and low distraction.

These formats are not just revenue sources; they are critical to delivering a richer, more dynamic environment that keeps audiences engaged, reduces fatigue, and avoids long-standing issues like slate and ad repetition. In doing so, they broaden advertiser appeal, bringing in a more diverse mix of buyers, including performance marketers, direct-to-consumer brands, and emerging verticals seeking high-impact, non-linear placements. When combined with demand partners eager to experiment with high-performing inventory, these formats deliver meaningful value, drive engagement, and improve ad relevance while protecting the integrity of the content flow.

How to Unlock Demand Diversification in CTV

To meet key performance and operational objectives, top holding companies, agencies, brands, and DSPs are seeking simplified access to CTV inventory, new innovative formats, and audience targeting options that target users where they’re spending their media time. So how can you unlock more from the buy side?

Building strong connections with buyers helps ensure that campaigns are matched with the most relevant inventory. This can mean aligning high-value content, such as premium long-form programming or niche FAST channels, with the advertisers best suited to them. Exploring a range of ad formats, like Home Screen placements or pause ads, can also attract incremental spend from different parts of the market.

Magnite has longstanding agency and buyer relationships, funneling brand-direct and agency demand toward media owners. Our Demand Facilitation team works hand-in-hand with buyers to match their campaigns with the unique attributes of publisher inventory.

Develop strategic ties with Curators, specialist agencies, data owners, or media investment groups that offer tailored inventory packages that appeal to specific advertiser goals. Curators are growing in strategic importance, especially in CTV, where transparency, control, and custom packaging are critical to buyers. Through Magnite, media owners can tap into demand brought by curators to expand access to niche budgets and new spend paths.

Direct buying options offer a route to broaden demand, providing buyers with more streamlined and transparent access to inventory while giving publishers a clearer view of where budgets are coming from. ClearLine is Magnite’s unified curation and activation solution that empowers buyers and curators to discover, package, and activate premium inventory.

Mediate all types of demand in order to fine-tune demand sources and optimize yield from your ad inventory. Magnite SpringServe’s mediation offering brings together DSPs, SSPs, direct-sold campaigns, and programmatic demand in one streamlined system, empowering publishers to orchestrate transparent, unbiased auctions without the need for separate mediation tools. The result? More opportunities to connect with premium demand and optimize yield with a flexible framework that adapts as markets evolve.

Magnite supports the full spectrum of buying behaviors from open exchange to PMPs and direct, enabling publishers to meet buyers where they are, without operational friction. Our infrastructure allows for streamlined deal execution, custom packaging, and omnichannel support, so publishers can adapt to shifting demand strategies and diversify their deal flow accordingly.

The Future Belongs to Diversification

New formats and new budgets are coming to CTV. For instance, commerce media buyers are increasingly investing in CTV to extend their reach and drive outcomes across the funnel. CTV and streaming are too valuable to leave demand opportunities on the table. Media owners who embrace demand diversity and innovation in ad formats will win in the long term. With Magnite, media owners don’t just fill ad slots—they build resilient, dynamic, and optimized revenue engines tailored to the complexity of the streaming landscape.