120 Million U.S. Viewers Streamed Youtube Videos on Their TVs, says Youtube

Despite the concerns around social media privacy, it was recently reported that in December 2020, 120 million people viewed YouTube or YouTube TV on their TV screens. There’s no question that there has been an exponential growth in the connected TV space over the last year as people have been streaming movies and shows in their living rooms during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Google wants to make the best of this growth through YouTube. 

YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan was expected to update advertisers about the platform’s growth over the past year at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual leadership meeting on March 10. In March 2020, the number of people viewing YouTube on their TVs was 100 million, which means the platform saw a rise of 20 million until December 2020.

Streaming players like Roku and ad tech players like The Trade Desk benefited a lot from the pandemic. In 2020, eMarketer projected that US CTV’s ad spend was $8.11 billion and would reach $18.3 billion by 2024. Although viewing has been skyrocketing, most people stream in an ad-free manner through platforms like Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and Netflix. This allows YouTube to let advertisers know it can reach streaming TV viewers through its platform. 

YouTube said that while most content is still streamed via mobiles, in December 2020, more than a quarter of its logged-in viewers watched content almost solely on a TV screen. To address this increased shift to TVs, YouTube said that for the first time, in the 2021 and 2022 upfront season, advertisers will be able to use Nielsen to measure YouTube’s streaming TV inventory. Mohan said, “This is something brands have been asking for.” Until recently, advertisers could only use Nielsen ratings to measure YouTube’s mobile and desktop inventories.

YouTube has been working on developing advertiser tools and offerings, which helped the company grow 46% year-over-year in the fourth quarter to $6.89 billion. E-commerce skyrocketed in 2020, and YouTube believes that video plays a crucial role in this space. YouTube is also looking to use the short-form video trend to its advantage and developed the app Shorts for this.