FAST Channel Sponsorship on Pluto TV, Tubi and Roku

What the price gap actually buys: FAST inventory on Pluto TV, Tubi, The Roku Channel and Samsung TV Plus clears in the range of $16 to $24 CPM against $38 to $55 on the subscription streamers, and the gap is not audience quality. It is that FAST sells genre, channel and daypart while the subscription services sell shows and segments. If you need a specific title adjacency, FAST will not give it to you at any price. If you want a channel that belongs to your brand for a quarter, nowhere else sells it. The units that actually exist: The Roku home screen marquee, sold by day and daypart, the largest single reach unit in the ecosystem and priced like it. Pluto TV channel takeovers and single-sponsor pods on a named channel. Tubi pause ads and library adjacency. Samsung's first screen placement. Sequential and binge pods, which are the cheapest genuine format innovation on these platforms and the least asked for. Branded channels, which are a content business wearing a media buy's clothes. On branded channels: I will not build one without a licensed content pipeline of several hundred hours and a funded plan to refresh it every quarter. A branded channel with a thin library sinks in the guide within weeks, and the platforms do delist channels that fail to hold viewing. Most brands that arrive asking for a channel want a sponsorship of an existing one, which costs a fraction and starts delivering the same week. I will tell you which of the two you are actually describing. Category judgement: Court TV runs as a FAST channel and is the first thing every legal advertiser asks about. It is right for personal injury and consumer bankruptcy and wrong for anything sold to law firms, because that audience is people inside a dispute, not people running a practice. Animal and nature channels index strongly for pet food and pet health, with a heavy daytime senior skew that helps a joint supplement and hurts a puppy subscription box. Wellness advertisers should know that FAST daytime audiences run older and more rural than the subscription services. That is an advantage or a problem depending on what you sell, and you will hear which one I think it is before the insertion order, not in the wrap report. What I refuse: Sponsorships that are a genre-level pod with a title slate glued to the front. Home screen units for brands with no landing experience on the device, where the click lands in a browser nobody opens. Buys measured on video completion rate. And I will not quietly place FAST inventory inside a schedule sold to your leadership as premium streaming; if it is in the plan it is named in the plan. Not included: Content licensing, production and channel operations. App development. Creative. Subscription streamer buying, which is a separate engagement negotiated on different terms. Measurement design beyond the platform's own reporting. Who this is not for: Brands that need a named title adjacency. Anyone below roughly $30,000 a month, where platform minimums for the interesting units are out of reach and the open exchange serves you better. Teams whose reporting line only accepts last-click. What arrives: A rate and unit benchmark by platform, drawn from what these sellers have actually agreed to recently rather than from their one sheet. Negotiated terms in writing, with reach guarantees where a seller will give them and a plain note where they will not. A flight calendar built around the platforms' own seasonal pressure, since Q4 marquee pricing on Roku bears little relation to March. Weekly delivery against terms, and a handover document your team can run from if you take the next quarter in house.