Historians likely will recall July 2024 as the moment that forever changed television. That was the month YouTube broke not one but two Nielsen viewership records: It became the first streaming service to account for more than 10% of total TV viewing time as well as the first to surpass the sum totals of major media distributors like Disney and Paramount.
YouTube’s viewership — in living room TVs, not just on phones or laptops — has been growing steadily. But 2024 was a breakthrough year for the 19-year-old Alphabet-owned platform. In October, YouTube accounted for 10.6% of all TV viewership compared to Netflix’s 7.5%, according to Nielsen’s Gauge report, which measures the most-watched streamers each month. That was up from December of 2022, when the platform hit 6% compared to Netflix’s 7%.
YouTube also ranked No. 1 on Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge Report, which measures the most-watched media distributors on a monthly basis. During the eight months the Gauge has existed, YouTube has come in first place once and second place seven times. And in July, streaming on YouTube surpassed Disney’s total viewership, 10.4% compared to the 9.9% seen by the whole of The Walt Disney Company. (While only Disney+ appears on the Gauge report, the total for the Disney-owned Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ appears in the Media Distributor Report.)
YouTube’s viewership metrics are “a symptom of the way young people are consuming entertainment today,” Jon Giegengack, founder and principal at Hub Entertainment Research, told TheWrap. “It has big implications for the rest of the industry.”
The platform’s stellar 2024 doesn’t mean that traditional TV is dead. But it does underscore why other companies will need to become savvier in how they appeal to their audiences. And the numbers reflect a major shift in the greater media landscape at a time when major entertainment conglomerates are racing to minimize their exposure to plummeting cable television networks that are burning holes in their bottom lines.
“This was the year the coin completely flipped, putting the center of cultural relevance in the creator sphere, not in traditional media,” Evan Shapiro, an adjunct assistant professor at NYU who runs the Substack “Media War & Peace,” told TheWrap. He noted that Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump secured 53 million views. “Only the debates did better,” he said.
YouTube’s newfound success in the living room didn’t come out of nowhere. It is the result of consumers’ shift to streaming, falling prices for televisions and technological advancements on the platform.
And after a big 2024, there’s reason to believe YouTube will continue to be a leading force in the TV space. In November, the company inched up to 10.8% of total watch time, its highest percentage ever. Also in 2024, YouTube reported that over 1 billion hours of its content was consumed from viewers’ living rooms globally.
“We talk about YouTube on TV jokingly as the 10-year-plus overnight success,” Kurt Wilms, senior director of product for YouTube on TV, told TheWrap.
YouTube’s 2024 success story by the numbers
In 2023, YouTube averaged 8.6% of total TV watch time. During that year, the platform’s most-watched month was July, when the platform grew to 9.2% of total viewership. The jump occurred largely because of a rise in children’s viewing during the summer break. Netflix trailed right behind YouTube, averaging 7.7% of monthly total watch time in 2023.
This year the gap widened. In 2024, YouTube’s average TV watch time was 10%. Once again, July was a standout month during the year, owing to an increase in children’s viewing as kids aged two to 17 accounted for nearly 30% of YouTube’s viewership during that month alone. The shift continues a trend of children moving almost exclusively to streaming.
From 2023 to 2024, YouTube’s increase in overall TV watch time was 15.6%, while Netflix grew 3% in terms of average overall monthly viewership.
“That’s literally just on television, and the bulk of our content is still considered on phones,” YouTube CEO Neal Mohan told TheWrap in November. “People leave us out of the conversation sometimes, less so now.”
With that higher TV viewership has come more ad revenue for YouTube. During the first three quarters of 2024, the company recorded $25.67 billion in ad revenue, up 15% from $22.31 billion in 2023. It’s unknown just how much of YouTube’s increased television viewership resulted in the ad revenue growth, but living room growth clearly had a positive effect. And it’s all the more impressive considering rival streamers like Netflix and Disney+ prioritized their own ad tiers this year.
“The definition of premium is in the eyes of a beholder here,” Shapiro said. “If someone’s watching a creator or a podcast or a kids show on the television on YouTube, then it is premium in their eyes… increasingly, that’s not just to their eyes, but to the advertisers eyes as well. That’s something Hollywood has been, frankly, ignoring because it’s staring them right in the face.”
How it happened
Wilms, who has been working for YouTube for 14 years, said the company has “been investing in the living room for a very, very long time.”
He realized YouTube had become a serious TV competitor during an event this year, where several creators told Wilms that 30% to 60% of their watch time was coming from the living room. They asked him for advice on best practices. “When I got the attention of the creators, that’s when I finally knew it [had taken off],” Wilms said.
In 2024, the number of YouTube creators making a majority of their revenue from TV increased more than 30% compared to the previous year, according to YouTube.
The shift to television has led to several format and content shifts intended to capitalize on this sea change. Earlier this year, the company said it would allow creators to organize their channels by seasons and episodes, further mimicking the experience of traditional streaming TV. Wilms’ team also worked to put the Subscribe button front and center so that it’s easier for viewers to access new content from their favorite creators. And after multiview mode was introduced in 2023, YouTube rolled out a feature to allow creators to provide multiscreen live commentary for events on the platform.
Creators themselves have adjusted to the living room shift. In the podcast space, YouTube viewers watched over 400 million hours of podcasts monthly from living room devices in 2024. Similarly, video uploads in 4K quality on the platform increased 35% compared to 2023 as more creators released content that was optimized to be enjoyed in the living room.
Until recently, technology limitations and consumer trends have prevented YouTube, which launched in 2005, from making a serious run at traditional television. Though patents for interconnected TVs were filed as far back as 1994, the first major smart TVs were released in the 2000s. One of those was a 40-inch Sony Internet TV that cost $999 (about $1,400 today adjusting for inflation.) In 2024, a smart TV can be purchased for about $150.
As smart TV prices have dropped, streaming has been growing in popularity, as major studios scramble to catch up to Netflix before the bottom falls out of cable TV. Over the past nine years, the number of pay TV households is expected to fall by 26%, from 94.9 million pay TV households in 2015 to an estimated 70 million by the end of 2024, according to Leichtman Research Group. Streaming accounted for 41.6% of all TV watched in November, up from 38.2% in 2022, according to Nielsen.
And in 2024, children’s entertainment and sports content accounted for the most-watched programming on YouTube. Ms. Rachel’s channel, where the creator makes videos for babies and toddlers, has amassed 12.8 million subscribers and one of the highest watch times on TVs, according to internal YouTube metrics. In addition to platform creators, more traditional players in the space like Disney and Cartoon Network have experimented with uploading full episodes of their series on YouTube. And sports-related content grew 30% this year compared to 2023, encompassing pregame and post-game content as well as live games and commentaries.
What it means for Hollywood
While YouTube’s growing profile is putting more pressure on linear TV networks to find creative ways to pull in viewers, NBCUniversal was one of the biggest success stories of 2024 for how Peacock handled the Olympics. Viewership for the sporting event was so strong that NBCUniversal outpaced Disney on Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge in August.
“They’re a good example of a traditional media company really adapting effectively to how people watch,” Giegengack said.
It’s also telling, Shapiro said, that the two major media companies that invested in YouTube creators in 2024 came from the world of streaming: Netflix with the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight and Amazon Prime Video with “Beast Games.”
“Nobody’s leaning in as hard as those two, and it is fascinating to watch them advance the ball on it, even though they’re massive studios with massive budgets and massive platforms,” Shapiro said. “I do think there’s a way to adapt and really thrive in the creator economy right now.”
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos sees YouTube as more of an ally than an adversary — at least for now. “We clearly do compete with YouTube in certain segments of their business, and we certainly compete with them for time and attention, but our services also feed each other really well,” he said in July. Sarandos added that Netflix is largely looking to replace linear, not another streamer. “What we’re focused on here is …that other 80% of total TV time that isn’t going to either us or YouTube,” he said.
Mohan compared YouTube’s encroaching sway to the startup economy in Silicon Valley. “Startups ultimately came and became the next wave of innovation,” he said at a November event celebrating the opening of creator Alan Chikin Chow’s Los Angeles production studio. “The same thing is happening in Hollywood. What’s the difference between what Alan is doing here and the 100-year-old studio that’s down the street?”
Jose Alejandro Bastidas contributed reporting to this story.
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