If there was any doubt left that YouTube has become the dominant streaming force in the CTV living room, multiple data points released last week removed it.
First came a YouTube’s own disclosure that it’s now 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.
In a company blog post, Kurt Wilms, senior director of product management for YouTube on TV, said YouTube users are also watching more than 400 million hours of podcasts each month on living room devices.
For the U.S. market, the massive global CTV usage numbers coincided with the publication of Nielsen’s monthly viewership marketshare tracker, The Gauge, which showed YouTube expanding its share of overall domestic TV watching to 10.8%, up 1.8 percentage points YoY.
The huge CTV use, in turn, is helping to drive robust ad-revenue numbers for YouTube and its corporate parent, Alphabet. According to data released by eMarketer last month, YouTube ad sales will reach $8.68 billion just in the U.S. this year and despite a relative deceleration in the next couple of years, still increase 12.5% yoy to grow to $11.06 billion annually by the end of 2026.
As context, to better understand the size of this media business: At their peak in 2018, the once-vaunted NBCUniversal cable networks collectively being spun off as “SpinCo,” generated $11.8 billion annually. Consider that globally, YouTube generated $8.92 billion in ad sales in the third quarter alone.
Separately (but relatedly), YouTube announced last week a massive 14%, $10-a-month price increase for its virtual pay TV service, YouTube TV, upping the monthly bill to $82.99 a month, effective Jan. 13.
“We don’t make these decisions lightly, and we realize this has an impact on our members,” YouTube said in a note to customers.
YouTube TV, which touts all the major broadcast networks and ESPN in a base package that now exceeds 100 networks, has come a long way from the skinny bundle that debuted back in 2017 priced at $35 a month.
Its last price increase came in March 2023, when the monthly bill shot up 12%, from $64.99, to $72.99. But that didn’t appear to significantly hinder the virtual MVPD’s subscriber growth, with YouTube TV self-reporting 8 million subscribers for the platform in February, up 3 million over its previous disclosure (5 million) in June 2022.
“Going forward, we expect YouTube TV to grow subscribers at a similar pace of roughly 1.5 million per year, reaching 12 million subscribers in 2026 and generating nearly $11 billion in revenues,” equity analyst Michael Nathanson said in a research report to investors at the time of that most recent YouTube TV subscriber disclosure.
In that report, Nathanson predicted that YouTube TV would achieve profitability for the first time in 2024.