Ghost Audiences in CTV: Plan Against Who's Actually Watching

Tonight, front doors all over the country will open to ghosts.

Little ones in bedsheets. Big ones with a pillowcase full of candy. Everybody has a good laugh, and by 9 PM the porch light goes off.

The ghosts in advertising don't go home at 9.

They live in the subscriber count. And on Oct. 30, a column in AdExchanger gave them a name.

Meet the Ghost Audience

The column is called "Ghost Audiences Are Haunting CTV Measurement," written by Justin Fromm of Samsung Ads.

His point is simple. Subscriber counts, monthly active users and platform reach "tell us who has signed up but not necessarily who is actively watching and reachable."

So he splits the audience into layers, and I think every brand buying streaming TV should learn them:

Audience size. Everyone who could watch. The potential.

Ghost audiences. People who are subscribed but not actively watching during a meaningful campaign window, which he puts at three to four months.

Audience availability. People actually watching while your campaign runs. In his words, "the audience advertisers should be planning against."

Audience addressability. The slice of those available viewers who can actually receive your ad.

Here's the part that should make every media plan a little nervous.

Most plans are built on the first number. Results come from the third.

The Ghost Who Came for Football

The best line in the column is this one: "Viewer loyalty is to the show, not the app. Once a season ends, audiences move on."

Anyone who has ever signed up for a streaming service to watch one show knows this is true. You came for the show. The show ended. The app is still on your TV, and your name is still on the subscriber list. You just aren't there anymore.

Samsung Ads put a number on it. Of the new viewers who downloaded an app to stream NFL games during the regular season, two of every three had "ghosted" the service after the season ended. That's nearly twice the churn rate of existing users.

Two out of three.

They were real fans. They were really watching. For a few months, they were exactly the audience you wanted. Then the season ended, and they became a number in a report.

The column notes this is less pronounced on free ad-supported streaming channels, the FAST services. But the lesson holds: an audience is a moment, not a list.

Don't Let the Ghost Story Scare You Off CTV

Let me be clear, because somebody will read this and say "see, CTV is a haunted house."

It isn't. The streaming audience is enormous, and it's getting bigger.

According to Antenna, ad-supported Premium SVOD subscriptions reached 110 million by the end of Q1 2026. A year earlier it was nearly 100 million. Two years before that, 53 million.

And the ad tier is now the front door. Antenna's five-year look at streaming with ads found that for services with ad plans, ad plans make up 48% of current subscribers, 59% of gross adds in Q1 2026 and 78% of net adds over the past nine quarters. And 78% of Premium SVOD subscribers have signed up for an ad plan at some point in the past four years.

The money agrees. As cited in the column, CTV upfront spend passed linear for the first time this year (Media Dynamics), and Omdia projects global CTV ad revenue will grow from $44 billion in 2025 to $81 billion by 2030.

The people are there. Most new sign-ups are choosing ads.

They're just moving.

Antenna says it plainly: the ad-supported audience is "large in aggregate but constantly shifting." It found that 60% of everyone who signs up for a Premium SVOD service cancels within their first year. And 57% of pay-TV cord cutters go dark to TV advertisers within 90 days of cancelling. People move fast, in every direction.

So the ghost isn't a reason to stay out of CTV. It's a reason to buy it like you mean it.

Antenna's own conclusion says it best: driving engagement, not just acquiring subscribers, has become "the central operational lever." That's true for the streaming services. It's just as true for the brands advertising on them.

How to Buy the Living Room, Not the Ghost

Here's how we think about it at CS & Co.

Plan against availability, not sign-ups. The question isn't "how many people subscribe to this service?" It's "who is watching it during my flight?" Live shows, new seasons and sports while they're on the air are where the available audience is. That's why live sports streaming works best when you measure it locally, market by market, while the games are on.

Buy qualified households, not cheap reach. On paper, a ghost audience is the cheapest audience in the world, and it's worth nothing. A lower CPM on a list full of people who stopped watching in March isn't a deal. That's the whole argument for qualified households over cheap CPMs.

Time the flight to when people are watching and when they buy. Availability has a calendar. So does your business. Line them up. Put your weight where the season, the game or the premiere meets your sales day, and plan the spacing backward from the day they buy.

Keep score with your own sales. Here's the scariest part of a ghost audience. A plan built on sign-ups can look huge on paper and still miss the people who are actually watching. The only way to know is to check the result somewhere a ghost can't hide: your own orders. Read sales by geography against each area's own baseline, keep a few holdout areas dark, and triangulate so no single report gets the last word.

If your ads reached real people, your sales will show it. If they didn't, no subscriber count can cover for it.

The Honest Asterisk

This column was written by someone at Samsung Ads.

Samsung makes TVs and sells advertising. Its pitch, roughly, is that audience curation is moving to the sell side, to TV makers, SSPs and publishers, using deterministic viewing data "at the glass," meaning the screen itself. Samsung happens to own a lot of glass. So read the solution with that in mind, the same way you'd read any vendor's take on its own category.

But the idea doesn't depend on who wrote it. Signing up isn't watching. A season ends and people move on. Plan against the people who are there.

His closing line is worth keeping: "The next currency in streaming will be the strongest combination of reach and availability."

Whoever ends up selling it, buy it that way.

The Final Take

Happy Halloween.

The ghosts in CTV are real. But they're not in the living room. They're in the subscriber count.

The living room is full. More than 110 million ad-supported subscriptions, ad plans as the default door, and spending that just passed linear in the upfront. CTV is still the biggest screen in the house with a real family in front of it.

The trick is finding that family while they're watching. Not the one who signed up once, watched a season and left the light off.

So plan against who's watching now. Buy qualified households. Time your flights to the season and your sales day. And keep score with your own sales, so a ghost audience can never fool the report.

That's how we plan every campaign at CS & Co. It's built into the CS Method™. Want to know if your plan is buying people or ghosts? Find out if CTV is a fit.

Cory Poccia
CEO, CS & Co. Marketing Studio™

Ghost Audiences: The Scariest Number in CTV Is the One That Isn’t Watching