YouTube accounted for 10% of all TV watch time in March

In exactly one month, YouTube will host its annual Brandcast in New York City, during which it’ll emphasize—as it’s been doing for years now—that advertisers should consider it a serious competitor for living screen TV viewership.

So it’s probably pretty pleased to see that Nielsen‘s latest report says it accounted for nearly 10% of all TV watch time in March.

As The Wrap points out, this is YouTube’s 13th month as the most-watched streaming service on TVs. Its next closest competitor is Netflix, with 8.1% of total TV watch time. (Here’s some data worth noting for comparison: Netflix produced all three of the month’s most-watched original series–Love Is Blind, The Gentleman, and the live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Nielsen estimates those shows generated 15 million watch minutes for Netflix in March. YouTube, on the other hand, says it gets 1 billion watch hours on TVs every single day).

But while the gap between YouTube and its closest streaming competitor is an important number for the platform, we’re guessing it’s eyeballing the number 28.3% instead. That’s the share of watch time collectively accounted for by cable networks in March.

YouTube wants advertisers to give it their marketing budgets instead of cable—and it’s so committed to selling them on the idea that it moved Brandcast from the digital-focused NewFronts to the TV-focused Upfronts two years ago. With each percentage point it climbs closer to cable TV, it proves that it’s more and more of a competitor for traditional networks.

It’s not alone in seeing success on the small screen: Nielsen’s report found that digital/streaming was the only viewership category that grew year over year. It went up 12% from March 2023, while cable dropped 10% and broadcast dropped 4% in the same timeframe.

What does this mean for YouTube? Well, CEO Neal Mohan laid things out in his roadmap letter for 2024. He called living room TV viewership YouTube’s “next frontier,” and hyped up YouTube’s investments in sports, like its deal for the NFL Sunday Ticket.

“Creators are thinking about how to optimize their content for the living room, and it’s easy to see why–it’s where their audience is watching! In the last three years, the number of top creators that received the majority of their watchtime on the big screen increased more than 400%,” he wrote.

We can expect to see more data and details about YouTube’s TV ambitions in this year’s Brandcast, which will be held May 15 at the Lincoln Center.