Celebrating its 20th birthday in style, YouTube commanded an all-time best 11.6% share of all TV usage in the U.S. during February, pushing it past Disney to become the leader of Nielsen’s latest “Distributor Gauge.”
February marked only the second month that YouTube has led Nielsen’s market-share tracker since the research company expanded its viewership rankings to also include cross-platform usage by media companies back in May of last year. YouTube also surpassed Disney last July with a 10.4% U.S. monthly TV usage share.
Second-place Disney saw its overall usage share fall from 12% in January to 10% in February, likely the result of highly watched pro and college postseason football games culminating on platforms including ABC and ESPN.
For its part, however, Fox’s football season didn’t end until Feb. 9 with Super Bowl LIX. Its audience share jumped from 7.6% in January to 8.3% in February, largely driven by a record Super Bowl audience of 127.7 million viewers spread across platforms including Fox Broadcast and Tubi.
But this latest “Gauge” ranker’s narrative thrust is mostly about the recent living-room ascendancy of YouTube, which comes two decades after a trio of PayPal engineers formally established the platform on February 14, 2005.
Notably, Nielsen is only counting the “glass” (i.e. connected TV) portion of YouTube’s usage, so all that mobile watching isn’t even tabulated here. And the 11.6% figure just accounts for free, ad-supported YouTube, and not adjuncts like virtual MVPD YouTube TV.
As Nielsen noted, YouTube CTV usage in the U.S. has grown 53% since February 2023. Viewing by adults 65 and older has shot up 96% over that two-year span. Indeed, the explosion of CTV usage seems to have opened up entirely new audience demographics for YouTube. That 65+ demo represents 15.4% of YouTube usage, comparable to the 16.9% for kids 2-11.
In December, Kurt Wilms, senior director of product management for YouTube on TV, blogged that his company is streaming more than 1 billion hours a day globally via connected TVs, with viewing time for sports content including game highlights and postgame interviews growing by 30% YoY. He said that users were also watching more than 400 million hours of podcasts each month on living room devices.
The latest YouTube audience benchmark comes after parent company Alphabet reported that its ad-supported platform had achieved a record $10.5 billion ad revenue haul for the quarter ending Dec. 31.