The 2026 Small-Business Streaming TV Advertising Benchmark

Most "streaming TV advertising" cost guides are written by people who have never bought it for a small business. We have done it thousands of times. So instead of estimates, here is what the numbers actually look like across real local-business campaigns on Trusted TV.

Data: the Trusted TV platform, 4 weeks ending May 29, 2026, unless noted. See methodology at the end.

What small businesses actually spend

The typical daily budget is $25/day, roughly $700 over a four-week cycle. That is the whole cost: the video and the campaign management are included.

What your budget buys

A typical four-week campaign earns roughly 9,100 views and reaches about 5,900 people. Measured the way advertisers compare media, as a CPM (cost per 1,000 views), that averages about $42.50 across all campaigns. That CPM is all-in: it already includes the AI-made video and ongoing management, which most providers bill on top. Larger budgets tend to earn a lower CPM.

For context, a single 30-second spot on local broadcast TV often costs hundreds to thousands of dollars just to produce, before any airtime. Here the creative is free.

Attention, not clicks

Streaming TV is an awareness channel, and that is the point. The ads are non-skippable and play full-screen with the sound on, so the whole message reaches the viewer instead of getting scrolled past in a feed. If you need a bottom-of-funnel click this afternoon, search and social still win that race. If you want local households to know your business exists, this format is built for it.

Where the ads run

Although nearly every campaign targets a local area, in aggregate Trusted TV ads reached 18,310 distinct ZIP codes across all 50 states. Delivery roughly tracks where people live and businesses cluster:

Top 12 states by share of delivered impressions

Rank	State	Share of impressions
1	California	12.8%
2	Texas	9.2%
3	Florida	7.8%
4	New York	7.5%
5	Georgia	6.0%
6	Pennsylvania	4.0%
7	New Jersey	3.9%
8	Virginia	3.2%
9	Ohio	3.2%
10	Maryland	3.0%
11	Colorado	2.8%
12	Oklahoma	2.5%

The targeting is genuinely local: roughly 100% of campaigns set their own geography (only a handful run nationwide), and the most common setting is a 10-mile radius around a ZIP code, the same way a local owner thinks about their service area. Most targets are cities and ZIP codes rather than whole states.

Who is actually advertising

These are small businesses, not national brands. Among the businesses where we have firmographic data, 61% have 10 or fewer employees and 81% have 50 or fewer. The budget data tells the same story: a $25/day median is a local-business number, not an enterprise one.

How fast businesses get on TV

Getting on streaming TV used to mean agencies, insertion orders, and weeks of lead time. Here, the median business goes from signup to a live campaign in about 41 minutes. The AI writes the script, builds the video, and sets up targeting, so the slow part, production, mostly disappears.

What it means for your business

You do not need a big budget to advertise on premium streaming TV. This is what TV advertising for small business looks like in practice. For about the cost of a daily ad spend most owners wouldn't blink at, you can put a professional commercial in front of thousands of the right local viewers, with the creative made for you, for free. If you want to see your own numbers, the best way is to build a free video and watch a campaign run.

Methodology & limitations

• Source. Aggregated data from live Trusted TV campaigns.
• Window. Performance figures cover the four weeks ending May 29, 2026; budgets are as of that date. Figures are medians unless noted.
• CPM (cost per 1,000 views) is calculated from what the advertiser actually pays (the subscription budget) across delivered views. It is an all-in figure that includes the free video and management.
• Geography reflects where streaming services place each viewer (often IP or billing address), so some delivery can fall outside a target area. That is normal for streaming TV.