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Media|YouTube Has a Firm Grip on Daytime TV
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/business/media/youtube-has-a-firm-grip-on-daytime-tv.html
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At Nancy Ann Ling’s house in Central Texas, the TV generally goes on around 5 a.m., and Mrs. Ling flips over to the same app each day: YouTube. For many hours after that, the app keeps running.
As she prepares breakfast, Mrs. Ling and her husband stream the previous night’s monologue from Stephen Colbert or Seth Meyers. After her husband heads off to work, she finds comforting background noise for meditating. By the afternoon, she tunes into cycling videos as she exercises, and later turns to the YouTube channels of local news outlets while she cooks.
But when the sun goes down, YouTube goes off. Mrs. Ling, 57, scrolls to an app like Apple TV or BritBox for scripted entertainment.
And Mrs. Ling’s viewing habits mirror those of millions of Americans.
YouTube has been winning the streaming wars for years, generating more TV viewing time in the United States than Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and every other app out there. In November, it accounted for nearly 13 percent of viewing time, compared with 8 percent for Netflix, the next in line, according to Nielsen.
Much of YouTube’s lead, though, comes from its dominance during the daytime, adding a challenge for media and streaming executives who are trying to puzzle through how to close a widening gap.
At 11 a.m., for instance, YouTube had an average audience of 6.3 million viewers in October, Nielsen said. Netflix’s audience is less than half of that (2.8 million). Amazon has about a million viewers at that hour, and some streaming services, like HBO Max, Paramount+ and Peacock, draw fewer than 600,000.
