The number one streaming service in the U.S. isn’t Netflix, Disney+ or Amazon Prime Video: It’s YouTube. According to a new monthly Nielsen report released this week, YouTube was the top streaming platform in the U.S. for the past 12 months in a row (January 2023 to January 2024), peaking in November 2023 when it took up 9 percent of TV streaming that month. Netflix has consistently come in second, followed by Hulu and Amazon Prime.
In January, streaming overall took up 36 percent of the time Americans spent watching TV, with YouTube taking up 8.6 percent of that chunk, according to Nielsen.
YouTube has increasingly focused on its user experience on televisions, compared with smartphones, tablets and computers. The Alphabet-owned platform’s CEO Neal Mohan, who was appointed in February 2023, recently disclosed that its users around the world watch more than 1 billion hours of YouTube on their TVs each day.
“Viewers want everything in one place, from a live sports game to the BBC to Khan Academy and NikkieTutorials,” Mohan wrote in an open letter in January. He noted that the divide between content creators and the major studios is disappearing. “They’re redefining the future of the entertainment industry with top-notch storytelling that can’t be dismissed as simply ‘user-generated content.'”
YouTube said in a blog post on Tuesday (Feb. 20) that viewership of YouTube Shorts, the short-form video feature launched in 2020, doubled between January 2023 and September 2023.
Alphabet highlighted major streaming gains through YouTube in its latest quarterly earnings report. YouTube’s live TV service, YouTube TV, reported 8 million subscribers last month. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, shouted out YouTube for being the company’s main driver of subscription revenue. YouTube’s paid subscriptions, which include YouTube Premium and YouTube Music, reached 100 million subscribers at the end of 2023.
