Everybody's Business · Oct 3, 2026 · 17m · 5m saved
With Adam Lewinson, Chief Content Officer of Tubi
Tubi has 110 million monthly active users and has been profitable for four straight quarters, its chief content officer Adam Lewinson said.
The night before, at the same Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles, Netflix's Ted Sarandos had said none of the ad-supported streaming services had gotten very big or profitable, and named Tubi. Lewinson answered with the numbers, and with a different idea of what a streamer should make.
"So it is obviously entirely possible to be profitable and a free streamer." — Adam Lewinson
Adam Lewinson, chief content officer at Tubi, on Everybody's Business: he has been at Tubi a little over nine years, and before that spent years at FX, a network whose business, he said, is built on the kind of ambitious programming Sarandos was talking about.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 17 minutes of audio, 12 minutes of reading.
Here are the 9 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
Tubi is strictly free, and its bet from the start was that free streaming would beat paid
Tubi has been profitable for four straight quarters with 110 million monthly active users
Its viewers streamed 13 billion hours over the past 12 months
Prestige TV is a strain under any business model, not only an ad-funded one
Tubi has well over 450 originals, and about 20% of its monthly viewers watch them
Outside live sports and big news, viewing has split into niches, which Tubi serves with "rabbit holes" of content
A subscription service has to chase hits to sell subscriptions; Tubi aims at specific fandoms instead
A thrown football in a Tubi YA movie went viral, and an NFL coach judged the cheerleader's throw the better one
Tubi's Pride Month merchandise was given away, not sold, and was gone in moments
1. Tubi Is Strictly Free
The hosts introduced Tubi as an ad-supported streaming platform and asked Lewinson to describe the business for people who had never used it.
Tubi charges viewers nothing, and he said that is the whole model, not a starter tier
"So Tubi is the largest free streaming platform for long-form movies and series. We have 110 million monthly active users. We have over 375,000 movie and TV show episodes, so this massive library." — Adam Lewinson
"So in an era where sometimes free is a tier, sometimes it's a gateway to a different business model, for Tubi, it's strictly free." — Adam Lewinson
He said he has been with Tubi a little over nine years, and that he believes the company is about 13 years old. Its view from the start was that free would win, as it had before streaming, when paid channels were a small slice of television.
"It appears that we've been ahead of the curve in terms of free, but our thesis from day one has always been, inevitably, free streaming will win, just as free was always the biggest business model in the past, and the pay tier, sort of the linear days of HBO, Showtime, etc., maybe 10% to 15% of the ecosystem." — Adam Lewinson
The rise of subscription video on demand, the model of Netflix and HBO Max, changed that perception for a while, he said. The pandemic was the point at which Tubi took off, he said, because households under financial pressure were willing to watch ads in return for not paying.
"That's where the power of free really connected with viewers looking for that free experience and very comfortable with the trade-off of giving your time to watch ads in exchange for free." — Adam Lewinson
