The CTV Trends Report

Introduction

As streaming TV continues to mature, advertisers are starting to place greater emphasis on how their campaigns align with the surrounding content.

Brand safety is often at the top of the list in terms of advertisers’ contextual targeting priorities. Many still approach brand safety with broad exclusions, minimize entire programs, genres, and sometimes even publishers to minimize potential risk. News is one of the categories most affected, despite being a diverse environment that spans subgenres and programming formats, many of which are generally recognized as having limited brand safety risk.

Even within News programs, content is not static. Tone, emotion, and subject matter can shift from one moment to the next, as the same program may include brand-safe, feel-good stories and weather updates, as well as more serious coverage of topics like war or violence that would not be deemed brand safe.

Wurl’s minute-by-minute scene-level analysis of News reveals the nuanced nature of brand safety and the scale of the missed opportunity for advertisers.

In this report, we examine the growing role of News channels in the streaming ecosystem today: how audiences engage, what makes News valuable for advertisers, and what brand safety risk actually looks like at the scene level.

News on streaming TV is a premium environment that’s often overlooked

Major news networks have already made the shift to CTV. ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox now offer streaming News channels, bringing premium, trusted inventory into free, ad-supported environments.

News consumption itself is also growing and evolving. Dedicated news audiences are expanding, with millions more consumers engaging deeply with News content than in previous years.

For advertisers, this is a valuable, high-attention environment. Traditional News drives stronger engagement and delivers up to a 77% lift in brand recall, with higher attention paid to ads placed alongside it. Consumers are also highly receptive to ads in News environments and more likely to trust brands that appear alongside credible journalism.

News reaches a distinct, loyal audience

Looking at the audience behavior more closely, News viewers represent an incremental audience of habitual, category-loyal viewers.

Heavy News viewers (audiences that watch News for 15 or more days within a 28-day window) make up just 3% of overall streaming devices, yet generate 63% of all News viewing hours. When combined with habitual viewers (audiences who watch between 8–14 days each month), that total jumps to 6.4% of all devices, and accounts for over 80% of total News consumption.

Maybe more importantly, News-dominant viewing households represent a meaningful share of all FAST viewership. Devices that spend more than 90% of their time watching News account for 7.4% of viewing hours across all FAST genres.

For advertisers, this has clear implications. These audiences are not only highly engaged, but also difficult to reach through other genres. If advertisers are applying broad brand safety exclusions to all News content, they are potentially missing out on a sizable portion of their target audience. News is often the primary, and sometimes only, gateway to this segment.

News viewership on FAST is steady, with spikes that drive scale

Looking at how audiences engage with News on free streaming TV today, a steady pattern emerges.

News is a consistent part of the viewing mix. Over the past year, the category accounted for an average of 8.6% of all FAST viewing hours. That share has remained relatively stable month to month, with clear moments of acceleration. March 2026 marked the peak of that period, reaching approximately 10.7% of total viewing hours.

Over time we see that baseline viewership has increased, especially after spikes from major events. Moments such as elections, geopolitical developments, and other major global events lead to sharp increases in viewing, often followed by a sustained lift.

This pattern reflects a dual dynamic in which News functions as both an always-on viewing habit and an event-driven destination. For advertisers, that creates a mix of predictable reach and high-attention moments that can be activated as they happen.

Market concerns continue to shape how News is bought

Despite this strong engagement and performance, News continues to be approached cautiously by advertisers.

In fact, in recent years, advertisers’ wariness toward News has increased, with brand safety cited as a top reason for pulling back on spend. This creates a persistent tension: brands recognize the value of News environments, but remain hesitant to fully invest in them.

This caution is reinforced by consumer expectations. A majority of consumers say they would trust brands less if ads appear next to inappropriate content, and many hold brands directly responsible for where their ads show up. For this reason, marketers are still actively navigating the balance between avoiding risk and reaching the right audiences, with brand safety being a top priority.

From this perspective, News presents a tradeoff. Advertisers are balancing the need to avoid adjacency to sensitive or unpredictable content with the desire to reach large, engaged audiences. As a result, broad controls (such as category-level exclusions) are often used to manage that risk.

A closer look at brand safety in News

A true understanding of brand safety in News requires moving beyond blunt, genre- or channel-level controls.

Wurl’s tech is able to evaluate content scene-by-scene rather than at the program or channel level. This scene-level analysis assesses the content immediately before the ad break and allows advertisers to align with moments that meet their brand safety requirements instead of excluding the entire News category out of hand.

Scene-level analysis is based on industry-standard definitions, with content evaluated across key IAB-aligned brand safety categories, including:

• Death, Harm, and Tragedy
• Derogatory Content
• Firearms and Weapons
• Illicit Drugs
• Profanity
• Sexual Content
• Violent Content
• War and Conflict

How News compares to the broader CTV landscape

When we ran a minute-by-minute scene-level analysis, we found News is less brand safe than CTV overall, but not uniformly so.

Across all analyzed News content, 35.7% of scenes are fully brand safe across all IAB-aligned brand safety categories. By comparison, non-News content is approximately 20 percentage points higher, with just over half of all scenes meeting the same standard – a difference that helps explain why News is often approached cautiously.

That said, if we focus on the positive story here, this chart also highlights that a significant portion of News inventory remains viable for advertisers, if employing scene-level targeting tools.

Where risk appears within News

At a category level, brand safety risk in News is concentrated in a few key areas. In this next section, we’re pivoting how we look at the data to focus on the unsafe rate for each brand safety classification.

Death/Harm is the largest driver, with 43% of News scenes flagged, compared to 34% in non-News content. Violence and War/Conflict follow, each at 31% in News, versus 22% and 3% respectively in non-News. Firearms also stands out, with 20% of News scenes flagged, more than double the 9% seen in non-News.

These are the categories that most clearly differentiate News from the broader CTV landscape. At the same time, several commonly cited risk categories are far less prevalent. Derogatory Content (2%), Drugs (2%), Profanity (2%), and Sexual Content (3%) all appear at relatively low rates in News, in many cases comparable to or lower than non-News content.

This distribution is important. Rather than being spread evenly across all categories, risk in News is concentrated in specific, predictable areas tied to subject matter, particularly coverage of real-world events and conflict. For advertisers focused on specific sensitivities (such as avoiding drug-related content or violence), being able to target based on this level of granularity makes it possible to manage risk more precisely instead of excluding News altogether.

How risk appears in subgenres of News

Not all News content carries the same level or type of brand safety risk. 

At a sub-genre level, variation is significant. Financial News stands out in particular, with 86% of scene minutes classified as fully brand safe, while most other News formats cluster in a comparable range, with roughly 40–50% of scenes meeting full brand safety criteria.

For politically-oriented News, overall safety rates across the political spectrum are broadly comparable at a top-line level. Blue-leaning News sits at 45.5% fully brand safe, while red-leaning News is slightly higher at 48.3%, indicating that neither represents a meaningfully safer or riskier environment.

However, differences emerge in the type of brand safety risk in Political News. Red-leaning News is more frequently associated with War/Conflict framing and Derogatory Content, with the latter showing a pronounced gap (8.5% vs. 2.5% in Blue-leaning News). Blue-leaning News, by contrast, is more heavily driven by Death/Harm and Violence, with Death/Harm representing the single largest category and the biggest difference between the two.

Conclusion

Advertisers have been avoiding News on streaming TV. The data suggests they shouldn’t be.

News delivers consistent viewership, spikes during key moments, and represents a meaningful share of total viewing. Yet broad brand safety controls continue to limit how it is bought, often removing viable inventory along with higher-risk content.

The data makes that tradeoff clear. More than a third of News scenes are fully brand safe. Excluding the category outright means leaving a meaningful share of available impressions on the table.

A more precise approach changes the equation. With scene-level targeting solutions like Wurl Advertising, it becomes possible to evaluate content as it happens, and target safe, high-attention moments within News rather than avoiding the category entirely. 

For advertisers, the opportunity in this is straightforward: move from broad avoidance to selective access, and capture value that has been there all along.

Methodology

This report is based on Wurl’s aggregated data across major FAST platforms, with additional modeling to highlight trends for advertisers. To protect the confidentiality of Wurl partners and customers, certain figures are presented as percentages or directional trends rather than raw totals. All findings are intended to illustrate broader patterns in FAST viewership and advertising opportunities, rather than represent census-level market measurements.

Data coverage: The data represents aggregated FAST usage across leading platforms. All analyses in the report use U.S.-only data, with the exception of the FAST HOV metric (8.6%), which uses global FAST viewing data to maintain consistency with prior analyses.

Our brand-safety scene-level analyses covered News content across a subset of 15 FAST News channels.

Brand safety categories: Content was scored based on eight IAB-aligned brand safety categories:

• Death, Harm, and Tragedy: Human deaths, tragedies, accidents, disasters, and self-harm.
• Derogatory Language: Negative or harmful comments targeting identity and/or protected classes.
• Firearms and Weapons: Mention or use of knives, guns, personal weapons, and firearm accessories.
• Illicit Drugs: Recreational and illegal drugs, paraphernalia, cultivation, head shops, dispensaries, etc.
• Profanity: Obscene or vulgar language.
• Sexual Content: Explicit or suggestive sexual language, acts, or other lewd content.
• Violent Content: Graphic violence against an individual or group.
• War and Conflict: Physical or military conflicts involving large numbers of people and discussion of warfare.

Timeframe: Analysis covers data from March 2024 to April 2026.

Scene-level analysis: Wurl’s large language model (LLM) evaluated News programming using minute-by-minute scene-level analysis, classifying 1-minute content segments across the eight brand safety categories listed above.

News audiences: Viewers are segmented into four groups based on frequency of News consumption within a 28-day window:

• Heavy viewers: 15 or more days
• Habitual viewers: 8–14 days
• Light viewers: 1–7 days
• No News viewers: 0 days