YouTube is dominating the streaming space, capturing more of viewers’ time than any other service. Nielsen classes it as a streaming service, pitting it against offerings like Netflix, Disney+, and Max—and, over the summer, it became the first streaming service to account for 10% of watch time on all televisions. That means one in 10 times someone turns on their TV, they bypass traditional networks and other streaming services, and flip to YouTube.
Just like Nielsen, YouTube leans heavily on watch hours as a metric of success. It doesn’t disclose how many individual people watch YouTube content on TVs–and, with paid servies like YouTube Premium, YouTube Music, and YouTube TV, the platform lumps revenue into one dollar figure, without giving specifics.
Now, competitors like Netflix and Roku are also moving away from disclosing exact subscriber counts. Netflix announced this past April that it will no longer report user numbers beginning in 2025, because the number of subscribers it has is “increasingly less accurate in capturing the state of the business.”
Subscribe to get the latest creator news
“We’ve evolved, and we’re going to continue to evolve, developing our revenue model and adding things like advertising and our ‘extra member’ feature, things that aren’t directly connected to number of members,” Greg Peters, Netflix’s co-CEO, told investors. “We’ve also evolved our pricing and plans with multiple tiers, different price points across different countries…So, this change is really motivated by wanting to focus on what we see are the key metrics that we think matter most to the business.”
And, just this week, Roku expressed similar sentiments, saying that its decision to no longer report exact user counts is because it’s “primarily focused on growing Platform revenue and profitability.”
“While a large portion of our Streaming Household growth is in our international markets, the majority of our Platform revenue is currently generated in the U.S.,” the company wrote to shareholders. “Therefore, as we continue to grow internationally, Streaming Household growth is not representative of Platform revenue growth.”
Per Variety, Roku plans to gauge success by using streaming hours as one of its main metrics.
Netflix also said it plans to focus on watch hours, “because we believe it’s the single best indicator of member satisfaction with our offering, and it is a leading indicator for retention and acquisition over time,” co-CEO Ted Sarandos said in April. “So, happy members watch more. They stick around longer. They tell friends, which all grows engagement, revenue and profit–our North Stars. And we believe that those are the measurements of success in streaming.”
The fact that major streaming services are bringing their metrics in line with YouTube’s–along with all the other statements Netflix has made about YouTube lately–indicates these services see the platform as a top competitor, and want to stack their numbers against its performance.
However that works out for those platforms (YouTube’s numbers, after all, are pretty high), this is a move from both of them that will help standardize performance across the streaming industry. Every platform can decide how they count subscribers (does one household count as a single subscriber? What if there are more than two accounts?), and the definition of “a view” is variable too. And, with varying subscription prices for every service (often multiple prices within the same service), pure revenue is also not a grade by which streaming services can measure how they’re doing versus the competition.
But time is the same for everyone. One watch hour on YouTube is the same as a watch hour on Netflix, and Roku, and Hulu, and traditional TV. As Netflix and Roku adopt that metric, we expect other services might as well, making this the new standard for streaming.
