Fox + Roku
Well, that’s one way to modernize an advertising business.
In acquiring Roku, Fox stands to shore up two of its biggest weaknesses in today’s TV – and increasingly streaming – ad market: a dearth of first-party data and a fledgling programmatic business.
“Roku is a need-to-have because Fox’s digital [revenue] is not that big. Roku does – like, overnight their digital revenues, or at least their digital video revenues, are going to explode once this goes through, you know, probably double, maybe triple” said Ross Benes, senior analyst at Emarketer.
To be clear, Fox has the bigger overall advertising business. It raked in $1.56 billion in total ad revenue in the first three months of 2026, whereas Roku’s ad revenue totaled $612.7 million. But the dynamic flips when focusing on the companies’ programmatic businesses.
“Roku’s programmatic business – from just a pure dollar perspective – is about twice the size of Fox’s,” said Sean Wright, chief insights and analytics officer at ad intelligence firm Guideline.
In the first quarter of 2026, the amount of money spent on Roku’s inventory through third-party programmatic buying platforms, including Amazon DSP, The Trade Desk and Yahoo DSP, increased by more than 40% year over year, according to the company. “The majority of our video delivery is now through third-party programmatic partners,” said Charlie Collier, president of Roku Media, during the company’s most recent quarterly earnings call.
“That [programmatic dynamic] is something that is truly setting [Fox] up in terms of quote-unquote future-proofing the business, but also making it a fairly unique play for Fox, once they figure out their tech stack,” said Wright.
Fox technically already has an ad tech stack in place. Its acquisition of free, ad-supported streaming TV service Tubi brought along with it the AdRise ad platform. That platform included an ad server on which Fox has been unifying its streaming properties, including its flagship Fox One, and that has served as the basis of the OneFOX ad platform that the company unveiled a year ago.
But Fox’s ad platform has been lacking in one crucial area: first-party data. While Tubi has nearly 100 million monthly active users, people don’t have to log into 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 subscriptions. Both instances can hamper Fox’s ability to build an audience graph, which Disney and NBCUniversal have established as pillars of a modern streaming advertising business.
“They have a large amount of first-party data through their digital properties, like websites, but I don’t believe they have a large robust first-party audience that could be scaled across multiple channels as efficiently for large enterprise advertisers,” said Greg Carlucci, senior director analyst at Gartner.
“Fox One only has 4% of U.S. online adults that are using it at least monthly, so it is literally one of the lowest streaming platforms that are out there,” said Mike Proulx, vp and research director at Forrester.
Roku, by contrast, has an audience graph of more than 100 million households worldwide that use its connected TV platform. Roku also has a deep well of data from its user base, thanks to the platform’s automatic content recognition technology that allows the company to track the content and ads playing through its devices. In acquiring Roku, Fox becomes the rare company in its traditional competitor set to own ACR data.
“ACR is huge. Fox is going to internally have viewing behavior data at a level they’ve never had,” said Benes. “They should be able to do all sorts of identity and audience graphing that they would have probably had to rely on vendors and rely on some probabilistic modeling for.”
Roku also brings ad buying technology. There is its self-serve ad buying tool Roku Ads Manager, and the company has likely hung on to the demand-side platform technology it acquired through DataXu, despite having shut down its DSP business. A Roku spokesperson had not responded by press time to an email asking to confirm if the company still owns the underlying DSP technology.
Finally Roku brings a complementary advertiser base, according to Wright, citing data from Guideline. Fox has a stronghold with automotive, banking and quick-service restaurant brands, which are categories that Roku under-indexes with compared to the ad market. But then Roku has attracted more performance-minded marketers, such as technology advertisers, including software-as-a-service brands, as well as insurance and retail companies.
So that’s how Fox’s and Roku’s business stand to complement each other. Next comes the work of actually combining those businesses. That remains an open question, not only because of the regulatory approval still required for the acquisition to close but also because of the comments the companies have made regarding their combination plans. For example, Fox plans to keep Tubi and The Roku Channel separate, which makes not much sense. Making less sense, though, would be keeping Fox’s and Roku’s audience graphs and ad tech stacks separate.
“Every merger and acquisition I’ve lived through in my life is always like, ‘We’re not going to touch any business, every business is going to remain identical on both sides of the house.’ And then obviously, the deal closes, and then all of a sudden lots of change happens on both sides,” said Wright.
What we’ve heard
“We’re going to play around with: ‘what could we gate? Do we gate all of it? Do we gate the more niche panels and the ones that have broader appeal?’ We’re having those conversations right now to shape it.”
— Fortune’s Adam Banicki on subscriber-only video
Numbers to know
$22 billion: How much Fox will pay to acquire Roku.
500 million: Number of subscribers MrBeast now has on YouTube, the most of any other channel.
What we’ve covered
Fox strikes revenue-doubling Roku deal:
- Fox has agreed to acquire the streaming company, which boasts an audience of 100 million households globally, in a $22 billion deal.
- The deal will make Fox the third largest organization in American TV by share of viewing, and combines the company’s formidable live sports portfolio with Roku’s homescreen capabilities and CTV tech.
Read more about the Fox-Roku deal here.
As AI reshapes search, TikTok turns discovery into a performance pitch:
- Daily searches on the platform are up 40% year on year, per the company.
- TikTok still finds itself having to convince a lot of marketers that it is as much a performance platform as a brand one.
Read more about TikTok’s performance pitch here.
Accenture’s Whalar bet: own the room when creator marketing gets complicated:
- Tellingly, the consulting firm bought Whalar the agency — the client-facing part that sits in the room when marketing budgets get allocated — not Whalar Group.
- Accenture took a similar approach with programmatic, having never acquired a media agency or DSP but positioning itself as the party that could tell clients which platform to use, how to integrate it and what to do when it broke.
Read more about Accenture’s creator marketing bet here.
Publishers put premium video behind the paywall to sell subscriptions:
- The Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Bloomberg are rolling out paywalled video series and livestreams designed explicitly to convert high‑intent readers into paying subscribers and give existing subscribers more reasons to stay.
- Subscribers represent 72.6% of total hours watched across Bloomberg’s video hub, livestreams and show pages.
Read more about publishers’ paywalled video strategy here.
Why Dove is betting on hundreds of creators for the World Cup:
- The Unilever-owned personal care line has hired hundreds of creators from mega creators, like Marshawn Lynch and Jordyn Woods, to micro talent tiers (creators with 10,000 and 100,000 followers) to get in front of at least 150 million potential viewers.
- Dove has a tiered approach to its creator strategy, which differs based on the size of the creator’s following.
Read more about Dove’s World Cup creator strategy here.
What we’re reading
Netflix may have walked away from Warner Bros. Discovery, but it hasn’t walked away from the M&A market, having bid on Roku and weighing an offer for Lionsgate Studios, according to Semafor.
Paramount has cleared another hurdle in its acquisition of WBD now that the U.S. Department of Justice cleared the deal, according to Politico.
Amid an overhaul of its streaming tech stack, Paramount is reorganizing its streaming teams around pillars including content, live video and monetization, according to Business Insider.
Bravo seems to have emerged as the rare non-sports must-buy in this year’s upfront market, according to Variety.
UK’s under-16 social media ban:
The U.K. government plans to ban people under 16 years old from using major social platforms, including YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, starting next year, according to the BBC.