UEFA Women’s Euro 2025 drives ad-funded streaming success

Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) specialist Yospace has revealed it stitched 6 billion one-to-one addressable advertisements across the duration of the UEFA Women’s Euro 2025 tournament, which is more than any previous men’s or women’s football event.

The data comes from 57 live streams with dynamic ad insertion, monetised by Yospace across three continents.

Yospace saw 30,000 more ads stitched per day than during the men’s tournament last year.

The amount of ads stitched for some rights-holders was double that of the last edition of the women’s tournament in 2022.

For the final, Yospace says the match began slowly in terms of audience size, hitting an early peak with Spain’s opening goal in the 25th minute, which, within 60 seconds, drove a 17% increase in stream starts.

Half of these came from mobile as casual observers tuned in to catch the replay.

There was another boost in viewers following England’s equaliser in the 57th minute, which drove a 57% increase in stream starts within 60 seconds.

Audiences continued to grow steadily throughout the second half and onwards into extra-time and penalties.

By the end of the penalty shoot-out, the audience had trebled compared to kick-off. As a result, the match delivered three high-value ad breaks that were not scheduled in advance. These were at the conclusion of penalties, immediately prior to extra-time, and at full-time of normal play. The latter would usually have seen a drop-off in viewers if the game had been decided in normal time.

The ad break after the trophy lift had more viewers than the one immediately before kick-off, over two hours earlier.

Yospace’s dynamic prefetch solution was applied to maximise ad revenues, calculating the amount of ad requests that the adtech ecosystem could handle at any given moment and providing it with the time it needed to deliver maximum value for each individual request.

“It’s been an incredible tournament, and huge congratulations to the Lionesses for lifting the trophy again,” said Tim Sewell, CEO at Yospace. “The rise of the women’s game is happening alongside a continuing rise in ad-supported streaming, meaning that Yospace stitched more ads during the tournament period than the men’s edition last year. Our job is to help ensure that every moment of engagement becomes a moment of monetisation for rights-holders – at scale, in real time, across any device.

“It’s no secret that monetising live sports at scale is challenging. Achieving the highest possible ad revenues at mass scale, while managing huge fluctuations in audience size and devices takes the challenge to a new level. In such an environment, Yospace’s decade and more of dynamic ad insertion expertise really shines through.”