fox + roku
That’s one way to modernize your advertising business.
By acquiring Roku, Fox intends to shore up two of the biggest weaknesses in today’s TV and increasingly streaming advertising markets: a lack of first-party data and its nascent programmatic business.
“Roku is a must-have because Fox’s digital [revenue] It’s not that big. “Roku is certainly going to see overnight their digital revenue, at least their digital video revenue, explode, probably double, maybe triple, if this passes,” said Ross Benes, senior analyst at Emarketer.
To be clear, Fox is larger in terms of overall advertising business. In the first three months of 2026, total ad revenue was $1.56 billion, while Roku’s ad revenue was $612.7 million. But things change when you focus on your enterprise’s programmatic business.
“From a pure dollar perspective, Roku’s programmatic business is about twice the size of Fox’s,” said Sean Wright, chief insights and analytics officer at ad intelligence firm Guideline.
The company said that in the first quarter of 2026, the amount spent on Roku inventory through third-party programmatic buying platforms, including Amazon DSP, The Trade Desk, and Yahoo DSP, increased by more than 40% year-over-year. “The majority of our video distribution is now done through third-party programmatic partners,” Roku Media President Charlie Collier said during the company’s latest quarterly earnings call.
“that [programmatic dynamic] It’s really set [Fox] “It’s important in terms of future-proofing the business, but once you understand the technology stack, it’s a pretty unique initiative for Fox,” Wright said.
Fox technically already has an advertising technology stack in place. The acquisition of free ad-supported streaming TV service Tubi introduced the AdRise advertising platform. The platform includes an ad server that allows Fox to integrate its streaming properties, including its flagship Fox One, and served as the basis for the company’s OneFOX advertising platform, which it announced a year ago.
But Fox’s advertising platform was missing a key area: first-party data. Tubi has nearly 100 million monthly active users, but you don’t need to log in to Tubi to use the service. Meanwhile, people can sign up for Fox One as a standalone subscription, but they can also authenticate with their existing pay TV subscription. Both cases could hamper Fox’s ability to build on the viewership graph that Disney and NBCUniversal have established as pillars of the modern streaming advertising business.
“They have a lot of first-party data through their websites and other digital assets, but I don’t think they have a strong enough first-party audience to scale across channels as efficiently as larger advertisers,” said Greg Carlucci, senior director analyst at Gartner.
“Only 4% of online adults in the U.S. use Fox One at least monthly, so Fox One is literally one of the lowest streaming platforms out there,” said Mike Proulx, vice president and research director at Forrester.
Roku, by contrast, has an audience graph of more than 100 million households around the world using its connected TV platform. Roku also has a wealth of data from its user base thanks to the platform’s automatic content recognition technology, which allows it to track the content and ads played on devices. The Roku acquisition makes Fox a rare company among its traditional competitors to own ACR data.
“ACR is huge. Fox will have a level of viewing behavior data that we’ve never had before internally,” Benes said. “They should be able to do all kinds of identity and audience graphing that maybe would have required relying on a vendor or relying on some kind of probabilistic modeling.”
Roku also brings ad-buying technology. It has a self-service ad buying tool, Roku Ads Manager, and even though the company has shut down its DSP business, it is likely clinging to the demand-side platform technology it acquired through DataXu. A Roku spokesperson did not respond by press time to an email requesting confirmation whether the company still owns the underlying DSP technology.
Ultimately, Roku brings a complementary advertiser base, according to Wright, citing data from the guidelines. Fox has strong positions in auto, banking, and quick-service restaurant brands, categories where Roku underperforms the index relative to the advertising market. But Roku has since attracted more performance-oriented marketers, including technology advertisers, including software-as-a-service brands, insurance companies, and retail companies.
In this way, Fox and Roku’s businesses are complementary. The next step is to actually combine these businesses. Completing the deal still requires regulatory approval, and both companies have commented on their plans for the combination, which leaves open questions. For example, Fox plans to separate Tubi and The Roku Channel, which doesn’t make much sense. However, it doesn’t make much sense to keep Fox and Roku’s audience graphs and ad tech stacks separate.
“My experience with mergers and acquisitions has always been, ‘We don’t touch any of the businesses, we stay the same on both sides of the house,'” Wright said. “And obviously, once the deal closes, all of a sudden there’s a lot of change on both sides.”
what we heard
“We’re thinking about, ‘What can we gate? Do we gate everything? Do we gate more niche panels and panels that have broader appeal?’ We’re having conversations to shape that right now. ”
— Fortune’s Adam Banicki speaks in subscriber-only video
Numbers you need to know
$22 billion: How much will Fox pay to acquire Roku?
500 million: MrBeast currently has more YouTube subscribers than any other channel.
What we covered
Fox signs Roku deal to double revenue:
- Fox has agreed to acquire the streaming company, which has an audience of 100 million households worldwide, in a $22 billion deal.
- The deal makes Fox the third-largest organization in U.S. television by viewership share and combines its formidable live sports portfolio with Roku’s home screen capabilities and CTV technology.
Learn more about the Fox-Roku deal here.
As AI reshapes search, TikTok turns discovery into performance selling.
- The company says the number of daily searches on its platform is up 40% year over year.
- TikTok still feels the need to convince many marketers that it is as much a performance platform as it is a brand platform.
Learn more about performance pitches on TikTok here.
Accenture’s Whalar bet: Earning your rights when creator marketing becomes complex:
- Apparently, the consulting firm acquired Whalar, the agency that is the customer-facing part that sits in the room when marketing budgets are allocated, not Whalar Group.
- Accenture took a similar approach with programmatic, never acquiring a media agency or DSP, but positioning itself as the party that can tell clients what platforms to use, how to integrate them, and what to do if they break.
Learn more about Accenture’s bet on creator marketing here.
Publishers put premium videos behind paywalls and sell subscriptions.
- The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Bloomberg are rolling out paywalled video series and livestreams explicitly designed to convert loyal readers into paid subscribers and give existing subscribers a reason to stick around.
- Subscribers account for 72.6% of total watch time across Bloomberg’s video hub, live streams, and show pages.
Learn more about publisher paywall video strategies here.
Why Dove is betting on hundreds of creators for the World Cup:
- The Unilever-owned personal care line employs hundreds of creators, from mega-creators like Marshawn Lynch and Jordyn Woods to micro-talents (creators with 10,000 or 100,000 followers), putting them in front of a potential audience of at least 150 million people.
- Dove takes a tiered approach to creator strategy, which varies depending on the size of a creator’s following.
Learn more about Dove’s World Cup Creator strategy here.
what we are reading
Netflix M&A activity:
Netflix may have exited Warner Bros. Discovery, but it has not exited the M&A market, making a bid for Roku and considering an offer for Lionsgate Studios, Semafor said.
Paramount WBD trading status:
According to Politico, Paramount has cleared another hurdle in its acquisition of WBD after the U.S. Department of Justice approved the deal.
Paramount’s streaming organization:
In an overhaul of its streaming technology stack, Paramount is restructuring its streaming team around pillars such as content, live video, and monetization, according to Business Insider.
What Bravo is all about:
According to Variety, Bravo has emerged as one of the rare must-buy stocks outside of sports in this year’s upfront market.
Social media bans for under 16s in the UK:
The British government plans to ban people under the age of 16 from using major social platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok from next year, according to the BBC.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.