The NFL’s biggest ad touchdown? Streaming.
After splashing out $14 billion dollars for exclusive streaming rights to NFL Sunday Ticket and seeing success with its first season, YouTube paid to pick up a 2025-2026 Week 1 matchup that pits the Los Angeles Chargers against the Kansas City Chiefs in São Paulo, Brazil. Unlike Sunday Ticket, the Chargers v Chiefs game (Sept. 5) will be free to watch for anyone with access to YouTube.
But that doesn’t mean YouTube will walk away without benefiting. As you probably know, the vast majority of YouTube’s revenue comes from selling ads–and a new report from TV data and analytics firm EDO asserts that digital ads should be more attractive to the NFL (and, of course, to the brands that run them) than ads on traditional TV.
That’s not to say the NFL isn’t doing well on TV. EDO’s data showed that during the 2024 season, TV ads run on regular-season NFL games were 19% more effective than ads on TV in general. That effectiveness shoots up to 63% during playoffs, and 243% more during the annual ad bonanza that is Super Bowl Sunday.
To put that in perspective, an advertiser would have to run 23 ads on non-NFL television to have the same impact as a single NFL TV ad, EDO found.
But ads on streaming-exclusive games are so effective they beat the NFL’s own numbers, it added. Data showed that digital ads run during NFL streaming-exclusive games are, on average, 66% more effective than TV ads run during broadcast/linear games.
That figure goes up during special events. The 2024 Black Friday game Amazon Prime Video picked up had ads 51% more effective than those shown during the NFL’s TV-broadcast Thanksgiving games. Ads shown during Netflix‘s Christmas Day games were 84% more effective for entertainment brands and 70% more for pharmaceuticals than the average 2024 season TV broadcast. Then there was Peacock‘s exclusive Green Bay Packers vs Philadelphia Eagles game, which had ads 116% more effective for brands than average TV ads, with engagement specifically benefiting Applebee’s, Little Caesars, and Subway.
“The NFL is so important to the TV ecosystem overall that it is, on average, more effective than all other types of advertising on TV,” Kevin Krim, EDO’s President and CEO, said in a statement. “The big push for the NFL has been to add streaming exclusives as a way to keep up with the evolution of where the audiences are going, which is to a streaming-first ecosystem.”
What makes digital ads more effective? Targeting is the big one, and scarcity is the other. On TV, the NFL has a limited number of ad slots, and it can only sell those slots to one brand at a time. The ~20 million people who watch NFL games each Sunday are shown the same ads, regardless of their demographic or consumer preferences. This spray-and-pray method means lots of people seeing ads that aren’t relevant to them.
On digital, there are many more slots, and those slots can be filled by brands using ad tools to target specific sects of the population. With digital ads, brands can reach people who’ve shown interest in products like theirs, or live in an area where they want to drive more awareness, or have certain conditions. That way, if ~20 million people watch one game, they could all be seeing unique combinations of ads, with dozens of companies having paid for slots on the same game with different audiences in mind.
Krim notes pharmaceutical companies in particular have traditionally shown “a lot of hesitance to pay higher rates to advertise a specific drug compound, because, in almost any case, you’re going to get a small fraction of the total population for whom that’s applicable.”
With streaming, though, there is “the opportunity for these big pharma companies, who have multiple compounds that can be targeted at different conditions, to buy a slot and target different folks,” he added.
This is all promising news for YouTube. Sure, Sunday Ticket earns money through pricey subscriptions, but as live sports continue to dominate in online content, it’s sure to want more exclusive games–and judging by EDO’s data, could make big bucks by punting top-performing ads alongside those streaming steals.
Stay up-to-date with the latest and breaking creator and online video news delivered right to your inbox.