The Long and Short of It: Measuring YouTube on TV
After a 12-year interruption, the Streaming Media All-Stars returns in 2025 (big reveal: 31 March) to pay tribute to a carefully selected group of key technology innovators worldwide who are driving and disrupting the streaming industry. Although a number of seasoned industry veterans made the list, an all-star team is fundamentally different from a hall of fame. While it may nod here or there to past glory, its primary purpose is to provide a particular type of snapshot of where the industry is and where it’s going.
Indeed, the four questions we asked each all-star—regarding their proudest professional achievement, their next big thing, and what they see as the industry’s biggest trend and biggest challenge—largely looked to the present and future. But one of the “proudest achievement” responses that dug deepest into the past (indeed, into the days of those ancient all-star teams of yore) revealed an undeniable aspect of our current state of play that few, if any, of us saw in the cards a decade ago.
“When I started working at YouTube in 2010,” one all-star reflected, “we never could have imagined that our videos would air on TVs. The distinctions between traditional programming and user-generated content are blurring. Short-form video—which is prevalent on mobile—is even more impactful on TV, as evidenced by YouTube’s recent report on TV watch time exceeding mobile.”
While YouTube’s arrival as a prominent and potentially pre-eminent CTV streaming platform is something industry pundits have recognized for at least a few years now, the industry continues to struggle with what to make of it, how to measure it, and how incorporate it into a monetization framework that’s more ad-centric and data-driven than ever before.
Revry TV COO and co-founder Alia J. Daniels acknowledged the way her company and other ad-supported streamers are refocusing on YouTube as a television set mainstay in a comment during a FAST panel at Streaming Media Connect in late February: “We look at the new stats that are coming out around more people watching YouTube on their television versus on mobile. YouTube really is, and always has been, a true distribution point. But now that we’re really seeing that data where people are actually watching on television in that way, that’s how we’re operating.”
Nielsen announced the global rollout of Nielsen ONE ads measurement for YouTube’s CTV app in February 2024 and continued to expand it to more countries throughout the year. Drill-down YouTube-on-TV measurement and reporting plunged several fathoms further shortly after YouTube crowned itself “the new television” in a February 11, 2025, blog post from CEO Neal Mohan, which cited 1 billion hours of YouTube content watched on television daily. On February 26, leading U.K. measurement body Barb announced that it will measure viewing across 200 YouTube channels beginning in Q3 2025.
Calling its program of detailed daily audience reporting a “world first,” Barb will categorize each of the 200 channels according to attributes of its producing individual or organization. Barb will work in collaboration with SeeViews and Kantar Media, which tested the measurement for Barb in a pilot program in November 2024.
While measuring YouTube on TV poses unique challenges and requires additional, Kantar-provided content-recognition technology to make viewers’ specific channels visible to Barb's scorekeepers, Google is laboring to make users’ experience with YouTube content on CTV as indistinguishable as possible to discovering and choosing content on Netflix or Prime with its latest app redesign.
As YouTube makes short-form viewing increasingly commonplace, measurable, and monetized on CTV, and other channels inevitably rush to adopt and repeat the formula, time will tell when “YouTube is the new television” gives way to “Television is the new YouTube.”
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Streaming Media presented its 16th Connect virtual conference February 25-27, featuring speakers from YouTube, Meta, Amazon, Roku, Akamai, Google Cloud, Plex, DAZN, Fremantle, A+E, Vevo, Philo, Tubi, The Trade Desk, Sinclair, Vizio, Revry, and more, and session topics ranging from live streaming delivery and FAST infrastructure and monetization to app and UX to programmatic vs. direct advertising to CTV and the OS wars.
28 Feb 2025