British technology company Yospace says it inserted nearly 11.6 billion addressable advertisements into live streams of the football World Cup, demonstrating how internet-delivered television can now support advertising at a scale previously associated with conventional broadcasting.
The figure is aggregated across 14 Yospace customers worldwide that streamed the tournament, although Yospace has not identified them. Its wider customer base includes several 2026 World Cup broadcasters, including ITV in the United Kingdom, M6 in France, TV4 in Sweden and Fox in the United States. Fox-owned Tubi also streamed two matches, while DirecTV distributed the US coverage.
Before the competition, Yospace had forecast that it would stitch more than 13.5 billion advertisements. The eventual total was about 14% below that expectation, but almost twice the six billion addressable advertisement insertions it reported for Euro 2024.
Yospace recorded an average of 297 million advertisements a day over the 39-day tournament. That was over 40% more per day than during the Paris Olympics in 2024, when the company reported four billion advertisements over 19 days.
The most striking figure came during the England–Norway quarter-final. Yospace says it stitched 13 million individually addressable advertisements into streams within two minutes at the beginning of half-time.
To put the 13 million advertisements into perspective, ITV alone reported a peak audience of 18 million for the match, but not all of those viewers will have been capable of receiving targeted advertising.
Yospace is not a new arrival created by the online video boom. It was founded in Staines, near London, in 1999 by David Springall and remains based there.
The British technology company subsequently experimented with user-generated mobile video. It was acquired by magazine publisher EMAP in 2007 but returned to independence through a management buyout in 2009.
As smartphones and segmented internet video developed, Yospace concentrated on server-side ad insertion. It demonstrated live server-side advertising with ITV in 2012 and subsequently deployed the technology with broadcasters and television services internationally.
RTL Group acquired Yospace in 2019 for a reported consideration of €19 million. The company now manages more than 2,000 live channels and says it normally stitches over 10 billion advertisements a month.
Yospace effectively joins an individual commercial to the video stream before it reaches the viewer. Rather than every online viewer receiving the same commercial break, each streaming session can receive advertisements selected for that viewer, device or location.
The expanded World Cup produced more opportunities to do this. There were 104 matches, compared with 64 in 2022, while three-minute hydration breaks in each half provided additional advertising opportunities for broadcasters choosing to use them.
Hydration breaks, rather than simply the additional 40 matches, were therefore central to the near-doubling of available breaks.
Short breaks during play may also prove particularly valuable. Yospace reported audience losses of only 0.4% during hydration breaks for some matches, compared with 16.82% at half-time. Viewers were apparently less inclined to leave when play was expected to resume within three minutes.
The introduction of a three-minute hydration break in each half created additional advertising inventory.
ITV decided against showing advertisements during these breaks in play, using them instead for tactical analysis. The decision was attributed partly to a desire not to antagonise viewers, as well as FIFA’s commercial restrictions. UK limits on advertising airtime also meant that advertisements inserted during play could have displaced commercial inventory elsewhere in ITV’s schedule.
The leading commercial broadcaster in the United Kingdom, which shared the rights with the BBC, described the competition as a “six-week summer Super Bowl” and its most lucrative sporting event. It said it had sold packages to 220 advertisers, including 70 appearing in football coverage for the first time.
ITV had previously said advertisers were holding back budgets to spend during the second and third quarters around the tournament. It carried 19 more matches than in 2022, with more games in peak time, while live streams on ITVX were enabled for dynamic advertising insertion.
ITV will publish its half-yearly results at the end of the month. They will not include most of the tournament period but may provide an indication of the commercial impact of the World Cup.
The Yospace figures show the infrastructure available to monetise the growing proportion of television viewing delivered online. Subsequent results from ITV may reveal more about the financial value that infrastructure helped support in one of the tournament’s major broadcast markets.
Television advertising is becoming individually delivered streaming infrastructure. The World Cup did not merely create more commercial breaks. It demonstrated that personalised advertising can now be delivered to mass streaming audiences with the simultaneity and resilience expected of conventional broadcasting.