IBC 2026 Preview: Audience fragmentation reshapes monetization and measurement strategy

As audiences spread across more platforms, media organizations are reworking how they generate revenue and measure performance.

At IBC 2026, running Sept. 11-14 in Amsterdam, coverage of monetization and audience strategy is expected to focus on advertising, subscriptions, analytics, audience insights and the technologies supporting those business models.

Platforms built for one tier, not many

Several executives said the shift toward hybrid monetization models is exposing limitations in platform architecture built for a single business model.

“Most AVOD and FAST shortfalls aren’t an ad-strategy problem — they’re proof the platform underneath was built for one subscription tier and never architected for hybrid monetization,” said Karl Tempest-Mitchell, executive vice president of Setplex.

That shift has also pushed organizations toward more granular measurement of the viewing experience itself, according to Yang Cai, chief executive and president of VisualOn. Cai said sustainable monetization now depends on real-time insight into what viewers are actually experiencing, prompting media organizations to look past backend data alone toward edge-level quality-of-experience telemetry gathered from within the player.

“It’s this device-level visibility into playback and ad-delivery performance that enables organizations to optimize ad revenue, reduce viewer drop-off, and strengthen retention,” Cai said.

Treating audience data as an asset

A number of executives pointed to first-party audience data, unified across platforms, as central to current monetization strategy.

Nina Walsh, global leader of business development for media, entertainment, games and sports at AWS, said the media companies performing best are treating audience data as a first-party asset, building unified profiles, modeling churn and using agentic AI to generate insights for content and revenue teams from a shared data foundation. She pointed to two shifts on the advertising side.

Advertisement

“Contextual, privacy-safe ad decisioning is replacing cookie-dependent targeting, and agentic AI on Bedrock is beginning to automate direct ad sales operations end-to-end, from campaign setup through optimization and yield management,” Walsh said.

Steve Reynolds, chief executive of Imagine Communications, said sustainable profitability is the defining business challenge for media organizations as audiences fragment and the cost of serving them across linear, streaming, FAST and on-demand platforms continues to rise.

He said momentum is building in global markets around a “Total TV” model that treats the audience, rather than individual platforms or ad spots, as the inventory, aligning planning, delivery, measurement and reconciliation across screens.

“The result is a more unified advertising business that uses audience insights and a clearer view of inventory across platforms to improve yield, increase automation, and deliver better outcomes for advertisers,” Reynolds said.

Getting that data to work in real time remains a challenge for most platforms, said Stephan Nicolas, chief commercial officer at Viaccess-Orca. He said audience data now needs to improve ad pricing, power content recommendations and predict churn largely from the same dataset.

“Natural language and GenAI interfaces are changing that, letting commercial teams build and adjust segments themselves without waiting on engineering for every change,” Nicolas said. He said the priority is activating first-party data more effectively within existing advertising and operational systems rather than adding another isolated layer of technology.

Connecting insight to editorial and financial decisions

Ivan Verbesselt, chief strategy officer at Mediagenix, said audience insights create value when they shape operational and editorial decisions rather than simply informing after-the-fact reporting.

“We’re seeing media organizations move beyond retrospective reporting and periodic programming by using audience data/insights and semantic intelligence to continuously optimize programming upstream, significantly improving content discovery,” Verbesselt said. He cited one customer, a global broadcaster with more than 25 million monthly active users, that saw conversion-to-play increase 33% and click-through rates rise 21% after adopting the approach, which he said came from helping audiences find existing content more effectively rather than adding more of it.

A similar disconnect exists on the financial side, according to Craig Wilson, principal enterprise specialist for broadcast at Avid. Wilson said production, financial and performance data have traditionally been held in separate systems, making it difficult for organizations to determine what content actually costs to produce and how it generates return.

“Bringing that information together within a more connected framework gives media leaders a clearer understanding of the true cost and value of each piece of content,” Wilson said, adding that the approach moves the conversation beyond producing more with fewer resources toward better decisions about where production investment has the greatest impact.

Measuring retention beyond the peak

Sahil Dhar Hakim, chief business officer at Evergent, said the more useful measure of a major viewing event comes weeks after it ends, not during its peak.

“Peak viewing tells you how big a moment became, not whether it created lasting value,” Dhar Hakim said. “The more useful measure comes eight weeks later, when a service can see how many viewers became known users and remained engaged after the event ended.”

Advertisement

Dhar Hakim said agentic AI can close the gap between that insight and action, allowing teams to personalize the next offer to a viewer based on behavioral context rather than sending a generic promotion.

Rethinking the ad format itself

James Smith, general manager of monetization at Frequency, said audience fragmentation is ultimately a revenue problem, as the traditional linear ad pod struggles to perform for audiences spread across FAST and connected TV services.

“Fill rates and low CPMs continue to impact ad spend for even the largest media organizations,” Smith said. “That legacy structure of delivering 15-second and 30-second ads is being asked to carry an audience it was never designed for.”

Smith said media companies are turning to newer formats, including pause ads, home-screen units and in-scene advertising, which combined with contextual and audience targeting can offer more engagement than traditional ad pods. He said buyers should look for solutions that give them greater control of inventory, support a broader mix of ad formats and use contextual and audience signals to improve the value of each impression.

“The goal is not simply to add more ads, but to create more ways to monetize audiences wherever they are watching,” Smith said.