Yospace has announced it stitched 11.57 billion one-to-one addressable ads in live streams throughout the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Equating to 297 million advertisements each day, the figure marks a substantial increase against comparative recent global events such as the 2024 Paris Olympics, which saw 41 per cent fewer ads stitched per day, said the company. The growth follows a shift in viewer attention from linear to app-based channels on Connected TVs, with broadcasters focusing on monetising their OTT streams by ensuring Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) is applied.
Increased advertising opportunities throughout the tournament created 637 ad breaks, compared with 326 in 2022, with a greater number of teams also meaning more matches. Most ad-supported rights holders utilised the hydration breaks which debuted during the 2026 edition.
Yospace’s busiest ad break, during half-time in the England v Norway quarter-final game, enabled 13 million one-to-one addressable ads to be stitched inside a two-minute window, highlighting the need for DAI systems and adtech to rapidly scale, it said. The company deployed its Advanced Prefetch System across the competition to ensure ad requests were spaced out, allowing the adtech sufficient time to respond and prepare for unscheduled breaks through extra time and penalties.
The VAR check ahead of France’s penalty against Morocco took three minutes to resolve, during which there was a 37 per cent increase in stream starts. Hydration breaks benefitted from a lower audience drop-off than other breaks, with Yospace reporting a drop-off rate of just 0.4 per cent against 16.82 per cent during half-time.
Tim Sewell, Yospace CEO, said, “The 2026 FIFA World Cup demonstrates the massive scale we’re seeing for ad-funded streaming today. The excitement of these moments, when entire nations are tuning in, means that the quality of the experience and the seamlessness of the advertising is absolutely critical. It’s a testament to the experience and dedication of the entire Yospace team that we have such a strong reputation for monetising major live events. The data tells us that we’re only scratching the surface of the kind of scale that live streaming is set to achieve, and Dynamic Ad Insertion technology must be able to meet that demand.”
