No, I didn’t miss the news that broke last week from Nielsen when it finally dropped their semi-timely monthly clickbait they call THE GAUGE.  They’ve conditioned most mainstream media trade sites to hold a spot in their news cycles when it releases their information roughly three weeks into the following calendar month, ostensibly to include all of the time-shifted data the majority of the data dusting it often needs to do when overnights are questioned.   And yes, you might have noticed the same kind of screaming headlines that I did from many of those sites, including this one that accompanied the obligatory regurgitation which THE WRAP’s Lucas Manfredi supplied last week:

YouTube Becomes First Streaming Platform to Crack 10% of Total Viewing in Nielsen’s Gauge Report

YouTube has made history as the first individual streaming platform tracked by Nielsen’s Gauge report to crack a double-digit viewership share, reporting 10.4% for the month of July.

The milestone marks a 7% increase versus the previous month and comes after it hit 9.9% of TV viewing in June and secured the second largest share of TV viewing among all media distributors.

To me, this may be a milestone, but it’s not like we haven’t seen this coming a mile away.  9.9% is practically 10%, and it’s been on a steady uptick for months regardless of season or competition.  So to me, the real story I want is no longer the number, but maybe some insights from credible sources as to why TF this is happening.

Thankfully, this burning question happened to be top of mind for Jon Giegengack and his auspiced allies at his Hub Entertainment Research, which you may note is a firm I’ve often given past props to.  So when he dropped this clickbait of his own yesterday, it finally piqued my interest.  Per an interview he gave to CYNOPSIS’ Lynn Leahey:

YouTube is becoming increasing indispensable to consumers. In a recent Hub study, YouTube Premium was ranked as a must-have source by 75 per cent of users, a fraction of a percent behind Spotify – and the rest of the top 5 included YouTube, YouTube TV, and YouTube Music.

What’s the appeal of YouTube?

YouTube has lots of differentiators, especially for young people.

• It’s free. 
• There are ads, but the ad experience is better than many other platforms: e.g., tolerable ad loads, spots are more likely to be relevant to the person watching, for some ads, there’s the option to skip if you don’t want to watch them.
• YouTube has far more use cases than “regular” TV shows: there are short form or long form videos. You can use YouTube as a tutorial center or a music player. Plus, the same app has things to watch on a TV screen and on mobile. 

The content may be technically “non-premium.” But that distinction means less to Gen Z viewers, and there’s no other platform that offers more utility in one place.  

And in that one paragraph, Giegengack man-splained the state of 2024 video far more succinctly and matter-of-factly than any set of graphs or factoids that Nielsen has offered in any of their gauges.

YouTube is an aggregator and a destination, not a programmer.  It doesn’t rely upon advertising and cross-promotion the way other streaming platforms have to.  It’s fulfilling a need more than a want.  And it essentially morphs into whatever your particular preference is.

My own utility of You Tube is on my phone as white noise.  I have a loop of timely newscasts from all over the world, occasionally broken up by clips from late-night talk shows and whatever comedic nugget my bestie happens to discover during her nightly scrolling.  When I visit another good friend, she has it up on her smart TV with an endless loop of mood music and dance tunes she uses to motivate herself and her visitors.  Our content choices couldn’t be farther apart, nor could our demographies.  But on the metric that Google values most–time spent–we’re both shining example of “gold card” consumers that Giegengack further reminds Leahey are increasingly valuable not only to sponsors but to its competitors:

The more time viewers spend on YouTube, the less they have available to watch other TV platforms.  And the more reason advertisers have to allocate their ad budgets to YouTube instead of those other companies.

And this morning Giegengack’s work got a much deserved shout-out and seal of approval from another brilliantly meticulous chronicler, our friend Evan Shapiro:

When you (researchers) ask media users which of their current apps are un-cancel-able, must-haves that they CAN NOT live without – they consider MORE THAN HALF of their media sources expendable.  Importantly, for those of us operating media businesses in the User-Centric Era, precious few of the big, elite “entertainment” brands land at the top of the “can-not-live-without” category. Spotify grabs the top spot, BUT YouTube takes up the next FOUR.

I’ve delved into need-state research myself in the past, and when the question is posed in a manner that asks what you cannot live without rather than what you like, the results are far more compelling than any mere data dump can offer.  When we put FX through such a filter, it revealed a far greater attachment than the likes of TNT and USA were offering–insights we leveraged with advertisers to deliver record revenue and support further expansion of the content and the brand.  I’m pretty sure the braintrust at YouTube are doing the same thing and more, given they’ve got a whole raft of proprietary data to back something like this up.

So for content creators and executives bemoaning the splintering of audience and underperforming the lofty KPIs set forth for them, I’d pony up for studies like this alongside whatever you’re paying Nielsen, and take particular note of the recommendations that Giegengack offers.  He even was generous enough to tease one in the Leahey piece:

How might broadcast and other streamers benefit from YouTube?  

In the short term, those companies can leverage social video to drive discovery of their own shows.  For instance, NBC and TikTok have credited the resurgence of “Suits” to scenes posted on TikTok.  In the long term,  YouTube provides a blueprint of how to make entertainment relevant to the next generation of consumers: higher volume and shorter production times; creating and leveraging communities (not just content); and leveraging the interests of users across categories (like short-form, gaming, music, or podcasts) instead of being limited to long form video.

There’s a bunch more, I assure you, and it’s more than worth your money to discover them as I did when Sony footed my bill.  If you’re in that kind of position yourself, I highly urge you to click here.  

You could choose to wait until the next Gauge report (it’s free and ubiquitous) but I warn you it will be somewhat outdated and skewed by Olympics content.   Studies like this have more shelf life and elasticity.  Take the chance to immerse yourself in it.  Because the next time you’re looking for a scapegoat to cite why your shows aren’t resonating (that would include you, Adam Conover) you might ultimately have nothing to blame but You.  Tube.

Until next time…