Sky, ITV and Channel 4 join forces in fightback against big tech’s ad market dominance

The TV streamers are pooling their advertising services to make it easier for small companies to run campaigns

Sky, ITV and Channel 4 are to fight back against the social media companies Facebook and YouTube by pooling their streaming advertising services to make it easier and more affordable for millions of small businesses to run ad campaigns.

The project is an attempt to break big tech’s stranglehold over the UK’s £45bn ad market.

Google and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have increasingly dominated the UK ad market and now hoover up two-thirds of the £45bn spent by brands annually.

While this has damaged the traditional TV advertising businesses of Sky, ITV and Channel 4, most of big tech’s ad revenues come from small and medium-sized businesses with smaller budgets that cannot afford to advertise on TV or pay agencies to book campaigns.