How Does Tubi Make Money? Inside Fox’s Free Streaming Business

How does Tubi make money when it never charges you a cent? Tubi earns nearly all of its revenue from advertising: it streams movies and TV shows for free, sells the ad breaks that run before and during each title, and pays part of that money to the studios and creators who supply the content.

It’s no longer a side project. Fox, which owns Tubi, says revenue passed $1.1 billion in fiscal 2025 and grew more than 25% in fiscal 2026, the year to June 30, 2026. That points to roughly $1.4 billion a year, although Fox doesn’t publish the exact number.

Tubi’s business model in one picture

Tubi is an AVOD service, short for advertising-based video on demand. You pick a title, the app plays it, and the ad breaks pay the bills.

That creates a different incentive from Netflix. A subscription service gets paid whether you open the app this month or not (our Netflix SWOT analysis covers that model). Tubi only gets paid while you’re actually watching, and CEO Anjali Sud has said that relying on ads alone changes how the company thinks about everything.

How money moves through Tubi: advertisers fund it, viewers watch free, and content owners get paid under each deal.

How does Tubi make money from ads?

Fox doesn’t split Tubi’s ad sales by type, but its earnings calls point to four main sources.

• Upfront brand deals. Big advertisers commit budgets in advance during the annual upfront negotiations, where Fox sells Tubi alongside Fox News and Fox Sports. Fox said its 2026 upfront delivered double-digit volume growth across sports, news and Tubi.
• Direct-response and partner channels. Performance-focused advertisers and automated buying fill the remaining slots. Fox credited progress in both for Tubi’s growth in mid-2025.
• Live events. Tubi streamed Super Bowl LIX for free in February 2025, which Fox called the most-streamed Super Bowl ever, and later simulcast a Thanksgiving NFL game. Fox has credited big events like these with bringing new users to the app.
• Sharper targeting. Sud has said Tubi uses AI to match ads to the scene on screen, such as a candy ad during Willy Wonka. Better-matched ads can sell at higher prices.

Most Tubi viewing is on demand rather than live channels, according to Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch. That sets it apart from its closest free rival, Paramount’s Pluto TV, which leans much harder on linear channels, as we explain in how Pluto TV makes money.

How much money does Tubi make?

Fox reports Tubi inside its Television segment and books the money as advertising revenue, so there’s no standalone Tubi income statement. Its earnings calls and proxy statements still disclose enough to build a solid picture.

Sources: Fox earnings calls (August 2025, August 2026) and proxy statements (September 2025, September 2026). Fiscal years end June 30. “Est.” figures are my calculations from Fox’s disclosures.

The number that matters: about a dime an hour

Divide revenue by viewing time and Tubi earns roughly 10 cents for every hour someone watches. That gives it two ways to grow: more hours, or more money per hour.

Fiscal 2026 did both. View time rose 20% while revenue rose more than 25%, so each hour earned around 4% more.

By quarter, revenue grew 27%, 19% and 23%, then 35% in the June 2026 quarter, Tubi’s biggest ever. View time rose only 17% that quarter, so pricing did much of the work. Murdoch said the World Cup’s direct boost to Tubi was meaningful but small.

For scale, $1.4 billion would be about 19% of Fox’s $7.34 billion in fiscal 2026 advertising revenue and about 8% of its $17.13 billion total, based on Fox’s August 2026 earnings release. Murdoch also said Tubi now brings in about 10 times the revenue it did when Fox bought it, which implies Tubi started near $140 million a year.

Where the money goes: paying for shows and movies

Content is Tubi’s biggest cost. Its library passed 350,000 movies and TV episodes in fiscal 2026, and Tubi made very little of it. Most comes through licensing deals; its UK launch lineup in July 2024, for example, included titles from Disney, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal and Sony Pictures.

How TV shows make money on free streaming services

Rights holders usually get paid in one of two ways. A license fee is a set payment to stream a title for an agreed period. A revenue share pays the owner a cut of the ad money the title earns, so it pays more when more people watch.

Tubi doesn’t publish its deal terms or the mix between the two. The math is the same either way: a title only makes money for Tubi if the ads it attracts are worth more than Tubi pays for it.

Tubi also funds its own shows and films, with 50 new originals premiering in fiscal 2026. Originals cost more up front, but they give Tubi exclusive titles to market.

Distribution is the other cost. Tubi’s app runs on smart TVs, streaming sticks, phones and the web, and platform owners such as Roku have long asked streaming apps for a share of their ad inventory in return for placement. Tubi’s terms aren’t public.

Does Tubi pay filmmakers?

Yes, based on how much their work gets watched. Sud told Fast Company that anyone can put content on Tubi through a non-exclusive revenue share, much like YouTube’s model. Its Tubi for Creators program added more than 20,000 episodes from over 400 creators in fiscal 2026.

Many independent filmmakers reach Tubi through aggregators or distributors, which take their own cut before paying out. What lands in a filmmaker’s account depends on hours watched, ad prices at the time and those middlemen’s fees. Tubi doesn’t publish rates, and payout stories on filmmaker forums vary wildly, so treat any single figure you see online as one data point.

Is Tubi profitable?

Only recently, and only just. Fox said Tubi turned its first quarterly profit in the three months to September 2025, earlier than expected. In May 2026, CFO Steve Tomsic said Tubi had come in slightly better than breakeven, its third straight quarter at breakeven or better.

On roughly $1.4 billion of revenue, that’s a thin margin. Fox’s net investment in digital initiatives, including Tubi and Fox One, fell to under $200 million in fiscal 2026 from just under $300 million a year earlier. Fox doesn’t disclose Tubi’s margin, though, so anyone quoting an exact profit figure is estimating.

Who owns Tubi, and why the Roku deal matters

Fox Corporation has owned Tubi since 2020, when it paid $440 million for a service with about 25 million monthly users. Farhad Massoudi founded Tubi, which launched in 2014, and Sud, the former Vimeo chief, has run it since September 2023. Fox itself is controlled by the Murdoch family, as we cover in who owns Fox News.

Reuters reported that Fox funded the Tubi purchase by selling the 5% stake it held in Roku. In June 2026, Fox agreed to buy all of Roku in a cash-and-stock deal worth about $22 billion, expected to close in the first half of 2027. Roku’s own free service, The Roku Channel, will stay separate from Tubi.

My take: the Roku deal could matter more to Tubi’s economics than any content deal. Fox would own one of the main screens where people find Tubi, plus Roku’s first-party viewer data for targeting. Every extra cent Tubi earns per hour across 13.2 billion hours is about $130 million in revenue.

The counterpoint, raised by TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz, is that media companies buying distribution platforms have a poor track record. Tubi’s dime an hour is proven. The Roku upside isn’t yet.

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