YouTube hits record 13.8% of US TV viewing time, Netflix trails at 8%, Nielsen says
YouTube's share of US television viewing hit a record 13.8% in Nielsen's Gauge report, ahead of Netflix's 8%, reviving a comparison Dan Rayburn calls misleading. Rayburn, who has tracked the streaming industry for 30 years and advises companies including Disney on live-streaming events such as the Super Bowl, points to each company's business model as the better measure. 'Why don't you look at the business model?' he says. Netflix has taken up that framing itself, telling investors that hours vary in value to its business. Live programming is set to account for slightly more than 5% of this year's content spending while producing about 1% of total viewing hours, yet it has generated six of Netflix's ten biggest new-member signup days over the past five years. Julie Clark, senior vice-president of media and entertainment at TransUnion, sees the live push as Netflix testing new ways to bring people into the service, alongside podcasts, beyond what keeps existing subscribers watching. Kenneth Suh, chief business officer at Nexxen, says more live and linear-style programming gives Netflix additional commercial breaks and new ad inventory to sell alongside its on-demand catalog.
Football makes the split concrete. YouTube has held NFL Sunday Ticket since 2023 and streamed its first exclusive NFL game last year, a Chiefs-Chargers matchup from Brazil that averaged 19.7 million viewers globally, yet added no further standalone exclusives for 2026. Netflix moved the opposite direction, extending its NFL agreement through the 2029 season and adding games around Week 1, Thanksgiving Eve, Christmas and Week 18. 'Netflix is not trying to be YouTube,' Rayburn says. 'And YouTube just basically said by not taking NFL games, you know, we don't want to be Netflix either.' Measurement adds a further complication: after its first exclusive NFL broadcast, YouTube revised its global average-minute audience for the game upward by roughly 2.4 million, citing a technical issue, and Rayburn warns that metrics such as average minute audience, total audience delivery, concurrent streams and monthly active users get compared as if they measure the same thing. Buyers weighing a Netflix live event against a YouTube exclusive are pricing two different products: appointment viewing built to pull in new subscribers on one side, a season-long paid tier sitting inside advertising, Shorts, creators and YouTube TV on the other.