Lifted by a 13% YoY rise in Roku households in the third quarter, and a 20% increase in time spent by Roku users on the platform, viewing of The Roku Channel has grown rapidly of late.
Roku said during its Q3 report that streaming hours on The Roku Channel app specifically were up 80% YoY in the three-month period. And that was reflected in Nielsen’s latest U.S. viewership market share tracker, The Gauge, which shows Roku’s free ad-supported streamer surpassing Tubi in usage for the month of November, accounting for 1.9% of all domestic viewing time.
Credit Roku with being Johnny on the Spot and readily furnishing StreamTV Insider this prepared quote from David Eilenberg, head of content for Roku Media: “The holidays came early for us at Roku as the Nielsen Gauge reported this morning that The Roku Channel hit a ‘platform-best’ share of 1.9% of overall television viewership for the month of November, up 12% from the prior month to tie Disney+ and surpass Tubi, Peacock, Paramount+, MAX and Pluto TV.”
The Roku Channel has nearly doubled its share of domestic viewing in one year. In November 2023, the app accounted for just 1% of all U.S. tube consumption, according to Nielsen.
Notably, streaming in general has continued to expand its dominance over U.S. TV, growing its share more than 5 percentage points YoY to account for 41.6% of usage in November. Here’s Nielsen’s November 2023 Gauge for context:
YouTube is the only other streaming company besides The Roku Channel to show significant YoY growth on Nielsen’s latest ranker, increasing by 1.8 percentage points to account for 10.8% of all usage. Notably Netflix declined 0.3% YoY.
Also notable is the rapid decline of linear cable, which eroded by 3.3 percentage points to 25% in November. Broadcast declined by just 1.2 percentage points over the same 12-month period and is almost on par with cable.
For greater context, consider that in 2021, when Nielsen debuted its popular monthly market share ranker, cable channels owned the lion’s share of viewing, 37%, for November that year. Streaming companies combined accounted for just 28% of usage.
Also at the time, Netflix was the top streamer (7%), time spent share-wise, with YouTube (6%) trailing the SVOD in share.