The New Power

In the midst of the popularity-boom of streaming services, one platform has successfully made the jump from being regarded as a mobile app to being the new reigning heavyweight of the streaming landscape: YouTube.

As of February 2025, Nielsen reported that YouTube had become the biggest television distributor in the United States (11.6 percent of total viewership) – read that again. Not just the biggest streaming platform, but the biggest television distributor. Period.

If we take a retrospective approach to this, just a few years ago YouTube was seen as a mobile platform – not yet in the same “television material” conversations as Netflix. Early gauges had YouTube well below seven percent of total viewing share.

Difference Makers

So what happened that allowed YouTube to make the leap and emerge as a standout despite the multitude of streaming titans already well-established in the 2020s? It’s tough to point to just one factor as the one; however, two major shifts occurred that helped facilitate this explosive growth:

1. The mass household adoption of CTV in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. With CTVs allowing YouTube to be thrown up directly on the screen with much more ease than air playing or connecting a laptop, it helped lower the barriers to YouTube’s success on a different device to mobile or laptops.

2. The audience had already moved TO YouTube. Gen Z and Millennials had already preferred YouTube to traditional linear television, even Boomers began making use of YouTube on their Smart TVs as well. And when YouTube TV was introduced, this effectively fully phased out linear in favor of this new, all-encompassing platform.

YouTube achieved 10 percent viewership share in July of 2024, and just seven months later, became the overall platform with 11.6 percent viewership.

Capitalizing on YouTube’s Success

YouTube is dominating the streaming and television scene, this has been established. But what does that mean for your campaign set ups? How can you best leverage this platform to assist your goals the best?

In short: if you’re buying any television without YouTube, you are missing out on reach to an incredulous scale. From our experiences, we’ve seen YouTube CTV outscale other streaming giants, such as Hulu, in overall audience penetration by figures within the range of 20 to 50 percent.

Couple this with the fact that YouTube is nearly unmatched in terms of cultural significance (everyone can name a channel, or content creator that brings them to the platform), and you’ve got a recipe for an untouchable throne for the next few years to come.

As advertisers, our question shouldn’t be what’s next – because “next” is already here. YouTube has taken off sprinting in the 2020s, and if you aren’t keeping pace with the streaming giant then you are unfortunately falling behind. Some words of wisdom: Follow the audience, follow the time spent, and follow the cultural pressure – you’ll see that it’s almost all on YouTube.

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