YouTube’s ‘New TV’ Rationale: Distance From Its ‘Adpocalypse’ Past

Almost 20 years to the day since YouTube was founded, CEO Neal Mohan made a bold declaration in his annual letter to the company last week: “YouTube is the new television.”

That statement, bought on by the news of YouTube’s viewership via TV screens surpassing both mobile and desktop viewership in the U.S. for the first time, is a testament to how far the video sharing website has come since its humble, low-res origins.

Of course, one may wonder why an online video behemoth like YouTube would care about being associated with the legacy medium television in the streaming era.

While the implied sheen and prestige that comes with the TV label may be part of it, the real answer is most likely because of money: As the “new TV,” YouTube has achieved its longtime goal of being as advertiser friendly as possible.

YouTube’s user-generated video model heavily relies on ad revenue for both paying creators and bolstering its bottom line. That model has its benefits, but it also presents unique risks other conventional streaming platforms don’t have to consider.

For one, there have been several instances where advertisers pulled back from the platform due to fears of their ads running on controversial or mature content, events cemented in internet lore as the “adpocalypses.”

YouTube has since calmed advertisers’ nerves by adjusting (some may argue overcorrecting) its monetization policies, but another key part of its strategy seems to be positioning its ad-friendly creators and TV-caliber content separately from the billions of other videos on the site.

This past fall, it overhauled its TV app not only to look more like a Netflix-esque streaming platform but to offer tools for creators such as channel trailers and the ability to organize videos by seasons.

And now, given that watching YouTube on TV is now the norm for most American viewers, it seems to have found an effective way to both champion its most valuable creators and keep advertisers happy.

In his letter, Mohan said directly, “Our growth on connected TVs is also attracting new advertisers,” and that already seems to be playing out: The company’s quarterly ad revenue crossed the $10 billion mark for the first time in Q4 2024, according to parent company Alphabet’s recent earnings report — a 14% increase from the previous Q4 and a 425% increase since Q4 2015.

While Mohan didn’t share the specific watch times by device, we do know, thanks to the Nielsen Gauge, that YouTube has been the most watched streaming platform by U.S. TV viewers for going on two years now.

When TV viewership is grouped by media company, YouTube hasn’t left the top 3 since Nielsen began tracking that metric last year, most of the time placing second only to Disney. For instance, just 0.1% of TV viewership separated the two companies back in December.

As for how YouTube went from a simple UGC platform to the “new TV” in 20 years, one big reason is its age. It wasn’t the first video sharing platform on the internet, but it was the first to catch on with the general public and as such altered how we collectively view — literally and figuratively — online entertainment.

As VIP+ covered in a special report last summer, YouTube has led the charge in online social video platforms rivaling not only TV but the major streamers in the race for people’s attention.

Still, aside from its online content, several cornerstones of traditional TV also live, in one form or another, on YouTube: Late-night shows cut episodes into shareable clips for their official YouTube channels, garnering millions of views despite dwindling audiences on TV.

News influencers have found sizable audiences, controversy notwithstanding, as more viewers turn to non-mainstream platforms. Mohan’s letter even pointed out how some outlets had deemed the recent presidential vote as the “YouTube election,” thanks to the millions of views generated by political videos.

And of course, there’s YouTube TV, which is quite literally TV on YouTube. The service provides its over 8 million subscribers access to more than 100 TV channels, including all of the major networks (for now, at least).

For an additional fee, YouTube TV users even have access to the coveted NFL Sunday Ticket, which YouTube nabbed from DirectTV for a cool $14 billion as part of the wave of streamers building up their live sports offerings. In fact, 12.8% of viewers who livestreamed the recent Super Bowl watched via YouTube TV, landing second to Tubi (18%).

In a way, the fact that YouTube relies so heavily on ad revenue is another parallel it shares with traditional TV. But thinking of it as a one-to-one replacement is shortsighted, considering the company’s dominant hands in several corners of the entertainment world — video, music, podcasting and so on. With that in mind, it’s also fair to say YouTube isn’t the “new TV” but rather something far bigger.