For years, YouTube has been handily beating Netflix‘s watch hours in the U.S. Now fresh data has shown it’s beating the platform’s watch hours globally, too.
And Netflix–despite co-CEO/YouTube critic Ted Sarandos admitting YouTube “is TV“–is not happy about it.
Last week, as stock fell after its Q2 earnings failed to impress shareholders, Netflix posted a viewership report covering the first half of 2026. Its thesis: watch hours don’t matter, actually.
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“We measure engagement not only by the quantity of hours watched, but also the quality of that experience for our audiences,” it said. “To be successful, we also need to have a variety of programming that appeals to different tastes and moods.”
(btw, despite the hours not mattering, Netflix did say the first six months of 2026 brought it “more than 97B hours on Netflix–our highest view hours to date for a half–across a variety of genres and languages.”)
Co-CEO Greg Peters echoed this sentiment during the platform’s earnings call, saying that not all watch hours “are created equal.” He cited Netflix’s lean into live events as an example, because live events apparently drive revenue and are good for new subscriber acquisition, but don’t result in a lot of watch hours.
Netflix also revealed this report is the last twice-yearly one it will release. Moving forward, it’ll only publish viewership reports once per year “to keep the focus on our primary financial metrics–revenue and operating profit,” it said.
This is the latest in a string of moves Netflix has made to obscure audience measurement data from outside observers. It stopped reporting quarterly subscriber gains in 2025, saying the number was “increasingly less accurate in capturing the state of the business.” Instead, it said, it would focus on other “key metrics that we think matter most to the business.”
Watch time seemed like it would be one of those key metrics, but Netflix’s focus, we suppose, is instead on raw financials.
So how are those looking?
Netflix came in at $12.86 billion against analysts’ expected $13 billion, with earnings per share at $0.82 versus expected $0.84. On top of the slightly lower-than-expected earnings, Netflix’s largest segment–U.S. and Canada–had year-over-year growth of 10%, an underperformance compared to the last four quarters.
This all points to “some kind of slowdown,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Geetha Ranganathan told Yahoo Finance, “and I’m not necessarily sure management has articulated what they can do to reinvigorate the business here.”
Shareholders appeared to agree with the sentiment: Netflix’s stock dropped nearly 8% following the call.
Here at Tubefilter, we’ve been tracking what’s at least part of Netflix’s reinvigoration effort: poaching top content creators from YouTube.
The platform has been on an absolute tear lately, signing deals with Jay Shetty, Rhett & Link‘s Mythical, Hot Ones, and the Stokes Twins. We already knew it viewed YouTube like a “farm league,” but in recent weeks, that approach is more evident than ever.
