• by Wayne Friedman , January 30, 2019

Tubi, the 4-year-old free, ad-supported OTT platform, says ad revenues in 2018 were up 180% over 2017, which helped the private media company become profitable. 

Speaking with Television News Daily, Farhad Massoudi, Tubi CEO, declined to disclose specific dollar numbers.

He did say some 1,000 advertisers ran campaigns over the last year on the platform, with growing ad categories including consumer products group (CPG), automotive, and telecommunications marketers.

Among Tubi’s investors is TV station group Tegna. That company’s OTT advertising sales group, Premion, sells advertising time on Tubi, in addition to Tubi’s internal sales team. Other Tubi investors include MGM and Lionsgate.

Media agency Horizon Media has struck a deal to access Tubi’s premium OTT ad inventory with “preferred terms.”

Massoudi says Tubi runs around four to six minutes of advertising time per hour.

Total advertising dollars on all U.S. OTT platforms have been estimated to have risen by 40% in 2018, from 2017, to over $2 billion dollars, according to media agency unit Magna. Hulu alone pulled in over $1 billion for its limited advertising/fee service.

Tubi now has a library of more than 12,000 movies and television series -- approximately 40,000 hours of content. It claims to have doubled the amount of streaming content titles compared to Netflix.

The company became profitable in the fourth quarter of 2018 and will reinvest proceeds for content deals.

Viewing on the site has rapidly climbed, and is now 4.3 times more in terms of minutes viewed on the site compared to the previous year.

Massoudi declined to reveal any specifics around the number of subscribers or monthly active users.

In November Tubi was added onto Comcast's X1 cloud-based platform, which has more than 13 million video customers, representing nearly 65% of Comcast’s overall 20.98 million subscribers.

Tubi is also available on OTT platforms and set-top-box services, including Amazon’s Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast, Xbox One, Sony PlayStation 4 and Android TV.