YouTube Viewership On TV Screens Exceeds Mobile For First Time In U.S.

Capping a years-long effort to emphasize the living room, YouTube said Tuesday that it now gets more of its total U.S. viewership on TV sets than on mobile devices.

U.S. viewers watch more than 1 billion hours in the U.S. counting both TVs and mobile, CEO Neal Mohan said. The exec expanded on those stats and offered several more in his annual letter to the YouTube community, posted on the eve of the Google-owned video giant’s 20th anniversary.

YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, and went live in December of that year. Google acquired it for $1.65 billion in stock in 2006.

“In two decades, YouTube has transformed culture through video and built a thriving creative economy. Today’s creators have moved from filming grainy videos of themselves on desktop computers to building studios and producing popular talk shows and feature-length films,” Mohan wrote.

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YouTube has spent the past two years as the No. 1 platform in terms of U.S. market share in Nielsen’s monthly Gauge report, Mohan noted. “But the ‘new’ television doesn’t look like the ‘old’ television,” he observed. “It’s interactive and includes things like Shorts (yes, people watch them on TVs), podcasts, and live streams, right alongside the sports, sitcoms and talk shows people already love.”

Mohan identified the four “big bets” the company is making in 2025, including on cultural relevance, the creator community, the living room and AI.

AI is helping drive advancements in a few areas, Mohan said, including reckoning with language differences. More than 40% of the total watch time of videos with dubbed audio comes from viewers choosing to listen in a dubbed language, he said.

YouTube plans to expand its pilot with CAA, which is designed to give more people access to technology designed to identify and manage AI-generated content that features their likeness. The company will also use machine learning to help estimate a user’s age, in an effort to ensure they get age-appropriate programming and protections.

Some stats were mentioned by Mohan but had been previously released. He noted that 45 million users watched political content on Election Day. Also, an Edison Research study last fall found that YouTube is now the preferred outlet for podcast consumption, based on total viewing time.