Ampere Analysis: ad tiers from Netflix, Disney, and others have collectively crossed 100M users in the US; 90%+ of Hulu subscribers are on its ad-supported tier
Context & Ripple Effects
When Netflix's ad tier was still nascent, sources put it at just ~1.5M US subscribers against Hulu's ~30M — a gap that framed the question of whether advertising could ever carry streaming economics. Ampere's new tally answers it: ad tiers across Netflix, Disney and other services have collectively crossed 100M US users, and Hulu was there first, with over 90% of its subscribers on the ad-supported plan.
The scale claim lines up with what the platforms themselves report: Disney counts 157M global MAUs watching ad-supported content across Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, including 112M in the US, while Ampere separately sizes the US streaming ad market at $17B for 2025. Crossing 100M US ad-tier users is the moment streaming ad inventory stops being an experiment and becomes a buyable medium.
First-order effects
- Advertisers gain a single-market streaming audience of 100M+ users across Netflix, Disney/Hulu and peers — inventory that competes directly with linear TV budgets rather than supplementing them.
- Hulu's 90%+ ad-tier mix makes it functionally an ad-supported service with a subscription fee attached, putting ad sales performance, not plan pricing, at the center of Disney's Hulu economics.
Second-order effects
- Rivals are pushed to steer new signups into ad plans through pricing and packaging — a dynamic Morgan Stanley later confirmed, finding ad tiers accounted for all US net subscriber additions in 2025 and half of Disney+'s base.
- Ad-tier scale forces every major streamer to build ad-tech stacks, measurement tools, and direct sales relationships they never needed as pure subscription businesses, raising the fixed cost of competing.
Third-order effects
- If ad tiers keep supplying net growth, streaming settles into broadcast-style dual-revenue economics where the headline metric shifts from subscribers to monthly ad-reachable users — the accounting Disney already uses.
- Scale thresholds of this kind concentrate advertiser budgets toward the largest combined audiences; Ampere's earlier finding that Disney+ and Hulu together would lead all services in popular US titles positions that pairing to dominate ad-backed streaming.
The trend: US streaming is completing its shift from pure subscription to hybrid ad-supported economics, with ad tiers moving from discount option to default plan.