Streaming Continues to Eat Away at TV's Market Share, Benefiting These Holdings
Let’s review recent data on streaming video and search engine market share and what it means for our Pro Portfolio positions.
You're reading 0 of 1 free page.
Register to read more or Unlock Pro — 50% Off Ends Soon
As we get ready for quarterly earnings Wednesday morning from Bank of America BAC and Morgan Stanley MS, which should be upbeat based on favorable investment banking comments today from JPMorgan Chase JPM and Citigroup C, let’s review some recent data points on search engine and streaming video market shares, and what they mean for a few of our holdings. In other words, follow the data…
Search
First up, the latest data from Globalstats pegs Google’s GOOGL global search engine market share across devices at 89.6% for Q2 2025, down ever so slightly compared to the 89.8% figure for the prior six months. Over the same period, Microsoft’s MSFT Bing search engine lost a modest amount of market share as well, clocking in at 3.9% in Q2 2025 compared to 4.0% the prior six months.
The lack of any meaningful uptake by Bing raises a flag to us about the ChatGPT integration that was discussed several quarters ago. The reality, however, is that Bing and the corresponding advertising revenue stream are pretty small potatoes at Microsoft.
The search engine that picked up that lost share wasn’t Yahoo!, Yandex, or Baidu, but DuckDuckGo. That’s an interesting nugget of support for the Pro Portfolio’s Digital Identity thematic.
Streaming
Data in the chart from Nielsen’s The Gauge report for June shows streaming continues to take a bit out of broadcast and cable viewing, and odds are it’s taking advertising dollars with it. That’s a nice rising tide and bodes well for our digital advertising thoughts, but sizing up June 2025 streaming market share data with that from March supports the advertising businesses for Google’s YouTube and Amazon’s AMZN Prime Video.
Exiting June, YouTube’s streaming market share was 12.8% compared to 12.0% at the end of March, while Prime Video’s piece of the pie made more modest gains to 3.6% from 3.5% in March.
While some may be underwhelmed by Prime Video’s modest gain, let’s remember Amazon has other advertising streams, including those tied to its digital shopping business. As we discussed earlier this week, the extension of Prime Day 2025 to four days compared to five in the year-ago quarter should help drive favorable year-over-year comparisons for the high-margin advertising business within Amazon.
At the time of publication, TheStreet Pro Portfolio was long GOOGL and AMZN.
