Ready to hear more insights from TVREV’s Alan Wolk? Don’t miss out on the TVREV Pre-Game Workshop: The Future of Streamonomics at The StreamTV Show in Denver on June 11. Check out the lineup and register here to be in the know on the latest and what’s up next across FAST, local TV, TVOS, and contextual advertising.
1. YouTube Dominates The Television Set
Another month, another Nielsen Gauge report that shows YouTube out in front, even, this month, when the results are grouped by parent company.
It should be clear by now that watching YouTube on the big screen is neither a fluke nor a passing fancy.
So the question then becomes “What do we make of this and how does it impact the industry in years to come?”
And the answer is the impact may be severe and may help to dethrone television as the era’s dominant medium.
Allow me to explain.
Why It Matters
YouTube is both TV and Not TV.
Meaning that it shares many of the same qualities as “television” and attracts much of the same audience and yet it is not the same medium.
Or maybe it’s television that’s changed.
Regardless, YouTube 2025 is not a monolith. It does not dominate the culture in the way that television once did, giving us universal cultural touchstones and collective memories.
It is, rather, a series of individual clusters, each quite popular in a specific bubble and yet limited solely to that bubble. Crossover is rare and when it happens it’s more of a fleeting awareness rather than a full-on embrace.
And yet…
This is where we are now and as AI and its minions take over, it’s only going to get more pronounced.
Not “worse”, mind you, because for many people, this diffusion is a net positive, a way to truly feel connected.
But in many other ways, it is worse.
As a society, we are less strong when we are less cohesive.
One of the factors driving the postwar Pax Americana was the monoculture and the sense of unity it engendered. Without it, we are split into a series of low key fiefdoms, with—as has become evident since November 2024—vastly different perceptions of the truth.
Which truly sucks for advertisers in a whole variety of ways.
For starters, while a marketing campaign could once hang off the tagline of a big budget television campaign: The Choice Of A New Generation, Just Do It, Where’s The Beef?, Have It Your Way! (the latter proving uncannily prescient), marketers now have to try and push their message out to a wide array of audiences on a wide range of media, few of whom can be addressed in the same manner, with or without the same seemingly glib tagline.
Or, to put things in real world terms, Saturday Night Live can no longer do the commercial parodies that were once the mainstay of the show for the simple reason that there are no longer any commercials that everyone in the audience can be expected to instantly recognize.
If they recognize any commercials at all—many more upscale viewers exist in a commercial-free universe.
All of which makes understanding the nuances of the media landscape more necessary than ever and the companies that win in the years to come will be those who are able to stay ahead of the rapidly shifting landscape.
What You Need To Do About It
As an industry we need to reach a consensus on what YouTube is and react accordingly.
There is an argument that it is merely another kind of TV, as different from what’s on now as reality TV was from what came before it.
And a counterargument that it is its own beast, an evolution of television, more akin to the cable access shows of the 90s than to anything else.
Robin Byrd lives.
But that does not matter.
Time is finite.
And if more people spend more time watching YouTube it’s because they spend less time watching TV.
So it’s there and it’s not going anywhere and while it will never have the cultural impact of midcentury network television, it is the hand we’ve been dealt and we need to play it.
We need to make marketing and programming plans that play to the fact that while YouTube and Hulu may indeed both be watched by the same people on the same 105-inch screen, the experience is still different enough that the consumer does not think of them as the same thing.
At least not yet.
What we need to keep an eye on is whether that is changing, whether YouTube is swallowing up the living room or merely colonizing a small part of it: 88% of what is being watched on television sets is not YouTube.
It’s “TV.”
We need to look at that stat though with the full understanding that it might change, that the two might merge and become more similar than different, at which point a new theory of everything will need to be put into place.
As I noted in a very different post on LinkedIn last week, the key to success is to always be on the lookout for the next wave.
2. Oregon’s Privacy Alarm
The state of Oregon recently passed a law restricting marketers from collecting precise geolocation data, restricting collection to a radius of 1750 feet, which is approximately one-third of a mile or half a kilometer.
So close enough to know that you are in, say, downtown Eugene, but not close enough to know that you are at 541 Main Street, let alone Apartment 307.
Oregon is the second state to pass this kind of legislation, Maryland having gone first, and it is unlikely to be the last: consumers do not like the notion that advertisers are somehow tracking them and savvy politicians of all stripes know that and would be stupid (to use a presidential phrase) not to take advantage of it.
Why It Matters
Right now, we are living in a sort of golden age of privacy violations. The fact that advertisers can look at credit card transactions to determine which of the people who’ve seen their ad actually bought the product is a very useful tool, but one that freaks the average person the fuck out to a degree I cannot overstate.
What this means is that the idea of having a precise 1:1 accounting of television metrics is never going to happen.
And that it is not the end of the world.
Thanks to the wonders of AI, Big Data, or whatever buzzword you want to throw at the large mountains of data that are now easily interpreted and analyzed, we can project results with a high degree of accuracy, much more so than in the days of 20,000 person panels.
This, as we discuss in our upcoming report on Currency and Measurement, is one of the key trends to look for in the years ahead: As privacy regulations get stricter, measurement will need to rely less on personal identifiers and more on smart, privacy-safe approximations and the company with the best privacy-safe approximations will be the victor.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are a brand, agency or ad tech company, you need to prepare yourself for an era of much stricter privacy regulations, one where most sorts of personal identification are completely off limits.
That means accepting this is happening and putting time, money and effort into that and not into fighting these laws tooth and nail, which is what you are far more likely to do.
You must also understand that this is not necessarily a bad thing, that the data you get from these approximations will not be that far off (if at all) from the data you’d have gotten from tracking the actual consumers and that it will not have any sort of negative impact on your decision-making process.
It will also make consumers less skeptical of what the media industry is up to, do away with the undercurrent of malice inherent in all the “they’re tracking your every move” propaganda.
Yes, there will still be boots you accidentally click on that follow you around the internet, from your phone to your TV to your podcasts, but they will be few and far between.
And that thanks to the Oregon legislature, that nightmare scenario espoused by a long-forgotten influencer almost 20 years ago, where you were bombarded with lunchtime ads and offers as you make your way down Main Street (said influencer was thrilled by the prospect) is even more unlikely to happen than ever.
Small victories.
Ready to hear more insights from TVREV’s Alan Wolk? Don’t miss out on the TVREV Pre-Game Workshop: The Future of Streamonomics at The StreamTV Show in Denver on June 11. Check out the lineup and register here to be in the know on the latest and what’s up next across FAST, local TV, TVOS, and contextual advertising.
Alan Wolk is co-founder and lead analyst at the consulting firm TV[R]EV. He is the author of the best-selling industry primer, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk frequently speaks about changes in the television industry, both at conferences and to anyone who’ll listen.