The Super Bowl is prime real estate every year for advertisers eager to get their brands in front of millions of consumers at once. It’s also costly.

That’s why a small subset of ad space for streaming-only commercials is gaining traction and granting smaller brands time during TV’s biggest night of the year.

Comcast’s NBC broadcast network will air Super Bowl 60 this year, with the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots facing off from Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. NBC’s streaming service, Peacock, will simulcast the event. While streaming has generally become the overwhelmingly popular way to consume content, the Super Bowl is still primarily watched via the broadcast network.

The streaming simulcast — gaining viewers each year — features certain ad spots earmarked only for that audience.

Streaming-only spots make up about 10% of the full ad inventory during the Super Bowl and cost about half of what a traditional TV commercial goes for, said Mark Marshall, NBC’s chairman of global advertising and partnerships.

“So cheaper, but still not cheap,” said Marshall. “And part of it is also you don’t have many of these spots, right? So I think people caught on to this trick over the past couple years, and it’s done really well in streaming. And as a result, a lot of people are lining up and wanting to do that.”

Each year the cost of the national ads for the Super Bowl breaks a record. NBC sold out of ad inventory for the Super Bowl, averaging $8 million per 30-second commercial, with between five and 10 ads selling for more than $10 million each, CNBC previously reported.

The streaming-only ads, which still appear nationally, fill the slots that would host regional commercials during the traditional TV broadcast.

These spots bring in new advertisers outside of the mainstays like Budweiser and Lay’s. All of the Peacock-only commercials this year are new advertisers to NBC’s Super Bowl slate, Marshall said. For example, cowboy boots brand Tecovas and family location safety app Life360 both bought streaming-only ad spots this year.

The chief marketing officers for both brands noted the impact of the Super Bowl — as well as steep cost — in explaining their decision to go all in on Peacock.

Tecovas CMO Krista Dalton in an email called the company’s debut via streaming “a deliberate choice,” allowing the brand to get the impact of the Super Bowl with “a highly engaged environment while staying disciplined with our investment.”

Life360 CMO Mike Zeman said via email, “Streaming is a great way for us to test what being integrated into such a monumental cultural moment can deliver to our brand and business. It allows us to reach a massive, highly engaged audience of modern, connected families with an ‘out of pocket’ investment that doesn’t break the bank or occupy too large a percentage of our overall marketing budget.”

Last year nearly 128 million viewers watched the Super Bowl on TV and via streaming, according to Nielsen.

While NBC has had a digital offering for its last four Super Bowl telecasts, Marshall said more advertisers have been vying for streaming space as the platform reached 44 million subscribers.

And fittingly, that growth has been driven largely by NBC’s push into live sports. This month NBC will air the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics — which begin on Friday — along with the NBA All-Star game. It’s a live sports slate the company is billing as “Legendary February.”

“It’s obviously a huge year for NBC, and Peacock is more sold out than usual. We’re seeing a lot of brands leaning in with Peacock,” said Doug Paladino of ad agency PMG.

Paladino noted brands have seen good results advertising during “Sunday Night Football” games that are simulcast on Peacock, particularly due to the audience targeting capabilities on streaming.

The streaming-only commercials can also be something of an on-ramp for burgeoning brands that want to get their foot in the door of the big game.

Last year, direct-to-consumer health startup Ro bought its first ad during the Super Bowl — on Fox’s streaming service Tubi.

“The results that they got out of the Super Bowl for what they paid were an order of magnitude above what the traditional spot is,” said Philip Inghelbrecht, co-founder and CEO of ad tech firm Tatari, which worked with brands to place streaming-only and traditional TV ads in the Super Bowl, including Ro in both 2025 and 2026.

This year, Ro, which offers access to GLP-1 medications and telehealth appointments, ramped up its commitment to the Super Bowl and bought a spot in the traditional game broadcast on NBC. Tennis superstar Serena Williams will anchor the ad.

“Last year we dipped our toes into advertising in the Super Bowl through a buy on Tubi. It was a really attractive chance for us to really understand how our brand and our creative performed in that environment,” said Will Flaherty, senior vice president of growth at Ro.

Smaller brands have other more-affordable options to test the waters, too.

Manscaped, the men’s grooming company, decided to buy a spot before kickoff — a time slot less coveted than during the game itself, but still pricey — to push the next chapter of its business.

“Manscaped is a brand that has been around for a few years now, but we’re at this very important moment in our trajectory, which is a big push for products beyond the groin, which is our first claim to fame,” said Chief Marketing Officer Marcelo Kertesz. “We have something new to communicate to the world.”

“We know the spot itself is just one piece of it, a very important and very expensive piece of it, but it does make sense for us to do that in this moment,” said Kertesz. “It’s a desire I would guess all brands, at some point, have to be on that stage.”

Disclosure: CNBC parent Versant is carrying NBC Sports-produced Olympic coverage on its networks, including USA Network and CNBC.

The share of U.S. homeowners with high rates on their mortgages has jumped sharply in just the last few years.

That’s having a marked impact on the refinance market and a somewhat more muted impact on home sales. Rates have been front and center in the debate over how to improve home affordability — and for good reason.

In 2022, after mortgage interest rates hit more than a dozen record lows, sparking a refinance bonanza, barely 10% of homeowners had 30-year fixed mortgages with rates above 5%. Just four years later, that share has jumped to over 30%, according to ICE Mortgage Technology. About 20% of borrowers have mortgages with a rate over 6%.

Home sales have been less than robust over the last few years, with the National Association of Realtors reporting a historically low 4.06 million sales last year, basically unchanged from 2024. This, after hitting a 15-year high of 6.12 million home sales in 2022.

More recent sales, combined with some cash-out refinancing, pushed the share of higher-interest-rate borrowers up.

There has been a major focus by the Trump administration to lower mortgage rates as a way to boost home affordability.

The president recently announced a plan for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy more than $200 billion in mortgage-backed bonds. It is still a subject of debate as to how much lower that would push mortgage rates once the purchase is made, but just the announcement alone caused rates to drop a bit.

Industry experts say the actual purchases could shave perhaps about an eighth of a percentage point off the current 30-year rate, putting it right around 6%. Last year at this time, the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage was just over 7%, according to Mortgage News Daily.  

If the average on the 30-year fixed moved to 6%, 5.5 million current homeowners would be able to benefit from a refinance, according to ICE Mortgage Technology. Those homeowners could save at least 75 basis points on their rate, which makes the fees involved financially worthwhile, it said.

If rates dropped to 5.88%, that number grows to 6.5 million homeowners.

“The most popular interest rate that’s been used to buy a home over the last 3.5 years is between 6.875% and 6.99%, right? Nobody wanted to tell their neighbors they used a 7% interest rate to buy a home, so everybody bought down into this high 6% range,” said Andy Walden, ICE Mortgage Technology’s head of mortgage and housing market research.

“Coincidentally, those 15-basis-point-spread moves from this $200 billion in MBS purchase is moving rates from what would have been six and a quarter right now down to six and an eighth. And so it’s providing meaningfully more refinance incentive than would otherwise be out there, and it’s having an oversized impact on the market,” he said.

Applications to refinance a home loan are now about 120% higher than they were one year ago, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

As for home sales, the last four years were characterized by the so-called rate “lock-in” effect, meaning potential sellers didn’t want to give up their historically low rates. They therefore put off moves that they might otherwise have wanted to make.

Entering 2025, there were roughly 39 million homeowners with an interest rate below 5% and roughly 12 million with an interest rate below 3%, according to Walden.

“If you look at how those borrowers behaved last year, only about 6% of those folks gave up those low rates, either through a refinance to pull equity out of their home or through the sale of their home. Close to 95% of homeowners held on to those rates tight,” he said.

As for prospective homebuyers, a 15-basis-point drop on the 30-year fixed rate would save only about $35 a month on the mortgage payment for the average-priced home. Alternately, they could keep the rate and buy 1.5% more home.

“Certainly a move in the right direction, but not a massive movement for those homebuyers,” said Walden.