Q4 2025 review: where the demand actually lived

Q4 2025 was our first full quarter of production traffic. We promised ourselves we would write up what we saw, the flattering parts and the ones we would rather not. Here are the patterns from October through December, and what they are telling us about 2026.

Above expectations: ambient and edutainment

Sleep and ambient FAST channels paid better than we modeled — enough that we rebuilt the assumption rather than nudged it. Three reasons we worked out after the fact:

• Sessions were long. Long enough that a single viewer passes several ad slots, and the later slots still cleared well instead of decaying.
• The category is easy to buy against. Advertiser-domain blocklists and publisher category declarations rarely got in the way, so demand did not have to be talked into it.
• Supply was thin. There were not many well-made ambient channels operating, so demand stacked.

Niche kids edutainment also landed above our model. Premium category, low supply, high attention. We expect it to compress as more channels enter the niche, but not by much.

Below expectations: news and politics

News and politics-adjacent inventory came in well under what we had budgeted. The gap was almost entirely brand safety. Our largest advertisers arrived with pre-existing exclusions on political-adjacent content, and those exclusions swept up a lot of inventory that our publishers thought of as news rather than politics.

Publishers in this category were not happy with us. The feedback was fair. We did not represent how aggressive the blocking would be at the higher end of the demand stack. The controls in play here are blunt by design — publisher-declared IAB categories on site.cat and advertiser-domain blocklists on badv — and a blunt instrument does not distinguish a city council report from a campaign rally. We said so to the publishers it affected instead of blaming the demand side.

The thing that surprised us: Spanish-language CTV

Hispanic-targeted DSPs paid a consistent premium for impressions on Spanish-language inventory all quarter. The DSPs had budget. The supply was thin. The handful of publishers we had with meaningful Spanish-locale inventory ran close to sold out from mid-November onward.

This is the most underserved high-value supply gap we surfaced last quarter. We are actively recruiting Spanish-language and bilingual publishers in Q1 2026. If you operate a CTV or FAST channel with meaningful Spanish-language audience, we would like to talk.

The boring success: gaming compilations

Kid-safe gaming compilation channels were our most consistent performers. Long sessions. Several ads served per session. High repeat visits. Respectable eCPM. Steady margin.

There is nothing flashy about these channels. They show kids gameplay clips that kids enjoy watching. The ads serve. The viewers come back. A few of the publishers in this niche are quietly our best contribution-margin contributors.

Three things we are taking into 2026

• Spanish-language supply is the highest-leverage gap to close. We are weighting recruitment heavily this quarter.
• Ambient and wellness inventory keeps being undervalued in industry conversation. We are leaning into it.
• Category-level brand safety is too blunt for news publishers, and we should have said that out loud before they integrated rather than after.

If you want the cut for a specific category on your own traffic, ask us. It comes out of the same per-request logs we bill from.