Tubi CEO Anjali Sud on how the streamer attracts younger viewers

It’s one of the trickiest questions for any leader, especially in times of transformative change: when to follow the herd and when to go it alone.

Since taking the reins as CEO of Tubi in September 2023, Anjali Sud has been finding a unique path for the Fox-owned streamer.

The biggest streaming services in the world—Disney+, Netflix, Prime—battle for premium content and subscription dollars. Tubi, meanwhile, has gone all in on free, with its on-demand streaming app and library of more than 300,000 movies and shows. Tubi was the first streamer to add a TikTok FYP-style video scroll to its mobile interface to help users discover new shows by replicating the UX of the social media app that competes for their attention. (Netflix has since launched its own version.)

All of this aligns with the streamer’s strategy to target young people who have never had a cable subscription and prefer rabbit holes to broad buckets of content (an approach Sud has called “niche as core”). Tubi’s genre-spanning library includes everything from blockbusters like Jurassic World and originals like the young adult sports romance Sidelined: The QB and Me to content from a growing roster of social media creators including Jubilee, Kinigra Deon, and FunnyMike.

It’s working. While user growth seems to have slowed after exploding from 64 million in February 2023 to 97 million by the end of 2024 (Tubi now has more than 100 million users), profitability has arrived earlier than expected. Tubi generated $1.1 billion in fiscal year 2025 revenue and closed its second consecutive EBITDA-profitable quarter at the end of last year, powered by 19% year-over-year revenue growth and a 27% surge in user engagement.

I spoke to Sud about how she got here—and how she plans to maintain Tubi’s momentum in the face of ferocious competition.

When you left Vimeo for Tubi in 2023, you wanted to redefine the streaming experience, especially for younger users. Take us back to that moment. What was your vision for Tubi? I had spent almost a decade at Vimeo, helping to provide tools for creators to tell their stories. What I learned from that experience was that creators need audience, and it helps if the experience is free. Gen Z, Gen Alpha—they expect that streaming should feel as easy and personalized as when they open up Instagram or TikTok.

Where Tubi has approached it a little bit differently is that most of the [free advertising-supported television] platforms out there [e.g., Pluto TV and Roku] were taking live linear television and putting that [up] for free. You open up an episode guide, you scroll through channels, and you watch.

We made a different bet: free on-demand streaming. Think of it like a free Netflix. We have Hollywood movies and TV series all on demand. We make original movies, we now have creator content on the platform—all on demand. Audiences want what they want when they want it.

Tubi’s fans seem to both love it and gently mock it. I’m curious how you see that. Does Tubi have to be cool? Or does Tubi just have to be thought of with affection, as long as people are using it. I love it [the mocking]! I really do. For years, Tubi, we’ve had a little shade, particularly, I’d say, Hollywood, this questioning of, well—

The B movies, yeah. Wait, are you premium? But actually, I’ll tell you, I think the root [question] for consumers is more like: What’s the catch? In a world where streaming prices are dramatically increasing while the amount of original content is going down, you’ve got Tubi improving its value proposition, growing its content library. There is no catch.

Well, the catch for any ad-supported medium is that the user is the product. You get something for free, advertisers sell to you. Fair enough— we’ve been willing to make that deal for a long time. But let’s go a little bit deeper on the modern economics of free. What does it take to make free TV profitable right now? Scale. It’s a typical flywheel business. The more people we have watching Tubi, the better we are at understanding what they want. That allows us to monetize through ads that engage, which then allows us to reinvest in the content and the experience. If you look at Tubi’s growth in engagement, it’s not coming from a single hit [show or movie], it’s coming from that flywheel. As we get better at that—as that flywheel spins faster and faster—our margins will improve. That profitability and that improvement doesn’t come through cost cutting. It comes through growth.

Is there a particular ad tech or feature that you feel has especially high potential? With the latest foundation models and machine learning, there’s still plenty of room to improve personalization. The average person today, when they turn on their television, it takes them over 10 minutes to figure out what to watch. It’s got to go down to seconds, and I do think it’s possible. Something like 20% of us just give up and start scrolling [social media] on our phone. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t get to a point where you’re immediately like: Oh, there’s something here I want to watch.

And then with advertisers, it’s the same thing. It’s our job to make ads feel seamless, helpful, and useful to our audiences. We will use AI to analyze every single millisecond of content on our platform and contextually target an ad based on the scene, based on the sentiment and the feeling that the scene is evoking.

What’s an example of that? Imagine you’re watching Fast & Furious, and you pause during a car-racing scene. First of all, we should be able to pop up stats and things that are relevant to that scene that you might find interesting. We should also be able to pop up a car ad that has the same sentiment and feeling—and maybe even makes a contextual reference—to the scene you were just watching.

Let’s talk about “niche as core,” your strategy of embracing these culturally specific fandoms. First, we’re very committed to continuing to grow our library. Having a large library, it’s a listening tool. It’s a way for us to make sure we aren’t being prescriptive about what audiences want but letting them tell us what they want.

We’ve recently added quite a lot of stories from creators. For each individual viewer, we know there’s a paradox of choice. When every viewer opens Tubi, we want to surprise them with something that our data tells us they might like, even though they wouldn’t know it.

How do you define success for emerging storytellers on Tubi versus YouTube or TikTok? What is the pitch to them? It’s about expanding the pie for creators. We definitely don’t want to create a scenario where we’re saying: Don’t put your content on YouTube, or only put your content on Tubi. We’re not creating a walled garden. We’re not trying to own their IP or limit their creative freedom. And I think that approach is somewhat unique in the industry.

When we talk to creators, what we hear from them—especially the ones that have already built thriving businesses—is that they just want to elevate their storytelling. They want to take more creative risks, they want to graduate into Hollywood in some instances, maybe they want to do more with longer-form formats. And if you look at the direction a lot of the other social platforms are going, they’re moving into even more short form.

What is the default business model for creators on Tubi? Do you just calculate engagement and you give them a share of advertising, or is it more complicated than that? It’s actually the same pyramid we use for Hollywood content. We have nonexclusive content. Anyone can just work with us, and we will put their content on Tubi for a revenue share, very similar to what YouTube does. And then we listen. And when we see that our audience is really interested or fans are really interested in more from this creator, we will pay a licensing fee for an exclusive window on Tubi, all the way up to creating and producing and funding an original.

You led Vimeo, which evolved into a SaaS company that made tools for creators. What did you leave behind as you transitioned to Tubi, and what did you bring with you? Both are businesses where technology is meeting creativity and storytelling, and you need to find a way to bring those two cultures together. And I actually think it’s very hard. We have to be at the intersection now of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue. You have engineers who are deep into ML [machine learning] research, having to work hand in hand with creatives on the Hollywood lot who are producing content, and then you’re having to translate all that to brands. And I think what I’ve learned is that those different cultures tend to be very siloed and there’s a lot of internal friction.

How do you solve for that? First, the incentives have to be aligned. At Tubi, we have a single metric that we use to define success, which is viewer engagement. And increasingly, it’ll be viewer passion. It’s not just: Did somebody watch something? It’s: Did they love it? Did they comment on it? And every single [employee] has to feel like they will only succeed and fail if we are all together in that one thing. We just gathered our top 50 leaders in Orlando, Florida, last week, and we spent a lot of time together kind of working through the tensions and the trade-offs.

What were some of the main tensions that you worked through? We have a core model and a business that’s working and growing, and yet there are so many other things we can expand into. There are so many different things that seem great, but which of these are just “shiny object syndrome” and which are actually leading indicators that this is the future? There’s no playbook for what Tubi is trying to do. The things we debate the most are: What are we going to stop doing? What are we going to say no to?

Yeah, it’s such a hard question. There’s so much that you can do. Technology enables almost anything. But there’s only so much that you should do. We try hard to avoid the “let’s do this because other people are doing it” or because there are a lot of articles right now about how this is the new thing. That’s always a warning sign to me. And in our industry, there’s a lot of that. We try to think only about our audience. Instead of spending hours reading what everyone’s saying on podcasts and who’s buying who or all of that, it’s: How much time are we spending on Reddit or Wattpad understanding what fans are excited about? How much are we educating ourselves and taking the pulse on our culture and what our audience in particular cares about?

How does your audience inform your leadership team? A diversity of perspectives leads to better decisions and better businesses. I’ve always been a big believer in that. The leadership team at Tubi is diverse. We are diverse from a gender, ethnicity, and industry perspective. We have the Silicon Valley technologists, we have the social-first brand builders, we have the Hollywood born-and-bred studio people. We just launched what we call the Tubi Builders Program for AI and machine learning. We have engineers right out of college, and we are letting them immediately build stuff on Tubi. We need the people who are AI-native, who are naturally embracing these new tools.

And we have to hire people who represent the generation that we serve. If you look at our marketing team, there are a lot of Gen Z, socially native people on that team, as there should be. One of the best ways to have empathy for your customers is to have your customers on your team.

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