If it looks like a duck: Why YouTube should never be planned and bought as TV
Paul Evans analyses the gap between YouTube’s claim and conduct.
Jack Benjamin’s recent article asked whether YouTube’s new definition of a ‘view’ would undermine its effort to tap into TV budgets. It was a fair question, with considered reporting and reactions that largely concluded planning and buying practices wouldn’t change much.
Will YouTube’s new definition of a ‘view’ undermine its effort to tap into TV budgets?
However, the headline deserved a far more definitive answer than the one the industry voices provided. YouTube’s effort to be planned and bought as television was never credible, and this latest move confirms it.
YouTube has spent the better part of five years telling advertisers it belongs on their television plans. At Cannes Lions last year, CEO Neal Mohan claimed 200bn daily Shorts views and a billion hours of daily TV-screen watch time. Kim Larson, YouTube’s head of creators, told The Media Leader that YouTube should ‘absolutely’ be considered TV. The ambition has been stated loudly, repeatedly, and with conviction.
Can YouTube be both TV and a ‘home base’ for the creator economy? With MD Kim Larson
But YouTube’s own behaviour keeps answering the question its executives refuse to engage with. And that answer – demonstrated through action rather than rhetoric – is definitive: YouTube is not television. It does not behave like television. It does not submit to the governance structures that define television.
For anyone who understands positioning strategy, what YouTube is doing carries a familiar pathology. A business that behaves like one thing while insisting it should be valued as another isn’t making a bold strategic bet. It is exhibiting one of the most recognisable symptoms of weak positioning (and bad incentives): a gap between claim and conduct, visible to everyone except the people making the assertion.
What YouTube actually changed
The change itself deserves scrutiny before we get to the broader pattern, because it is remarkable on its own terms. A YouTube ‘view’ now no longer requires anyone to actually view anything. The metric fires the very instant play is initiated. No minimum duration. No evidence of attention.
The previous standard demanded a minimum watch duration before a play qualified as a view. It was a blunt instrument, but it carried at least some basic signal of viewer intent.
Google has stripped that signal out and replaced it with the weakest possible measure of exposure. The metric that previously told advertisers something about attention now tells them only that a file began buffering.
Meanwhile, the data that actually reflects whether anyone watched has been relabelled ‘Engaged Views’ and tucked away inside YouTube Analytics, invisible to the public and absent from the numbers creators use in sponsorship negotiations.
What sits on the surface is in effect an impression count wearing the vocabulary of a view. And the timing is perverse. The IAB and MRC have spent two years building attention measurement frameworks because the industry concluded that viewability alone wasn’t a sufficient indicator of advertising quality. YouTube has responded by weakening its primary metric at the precise moment the rest of the market is demanding stronger ones.
What independent scrutiny revealed
The measurement change would be concerning enough on its own. But it arrives in a context that makes it far more telling. In July 2025, Barb became the first joint-industry measurement body worldwide to report viewing of specific YouTube channels, using the same methodology it uses for linear TV and streaming. The results were instructive.
Children’s content dominated the rankings. Peppa Pig’s official channel came first, reaching roughly 758,000 UK viewers, with only 1.2% of those aged four and up watching for three consecutive minutes.
More than half of the top 20 channels targeted young audiences. What YouTube actually looks like on a television screen turned out to be quite different from the premium cultural experience its commercial narrative promotes.
Six months later, Google issued cease-and-desist letters to Barb and Kantar Media, forcing the service to shut down. As Lindsey Clay, CEO of Thinkbox, observed: YouTube has spent enormous effort convincing advertisers it is television, but the moment it faced TV-like scrutiny, it went legal to avoid it.
Justin Lebbon, quoted in Benjamin’s piece, identified the structural issue beneath the dispute. Television companies cannot change their measurement standards unilaterally. They operate within frameworks agreed by advertisers, agencies and industry bodies. YouTube rewrites the rules whenever it chooses, and nobody outside Google gets a vote. That asymmetry alone disqualifies YouTube from being treated as television on any media plan.
The duck test, applied
The saying goes, ‘If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck ’. YouTube wants the industry to apply this test based on screen presence alone. People watch it on television sets in their living rooms. Therefore, it must be television. But the duck test works in both directions.
Television is defined by independent, advertiser-consented measurement. YouTube blocks it. Television operates within viewing standards agreed across the industry. YouTube changes its own whenever convenient. Television submits to content regulation. YouTube relies on algorithmic moderation at scale. Television’s audience currencies are owned collectively by the industry. Google owns YouTube’s data.
Applied fully, the duck test is conclusive. YouTube doesn’t look like television, doesn’t sound like it and doesn’t swim like it. Its actions consistently reveal a social video platform: aligning view metrics with TikTok, resisting independent scrutiny, operating outside advertiser-consented governance.
Its commercial narrative points somewhere else entirely. When behaviour and positioning pull this visibly in opposite directions, the explanation is rarely strategic complexity. A commercial incentive problem has been dressed as a market story.
TV budgets are larger, carry higher CPMs and come with the prestige of brand-building efficacy. Wanting access to television’s economics while refusing television’s obligations has never qualified as a positioning strategy. A more honest phrase is appetite without accountability.
What the industry should do about it
None of this makes YouTube a bad advertising channel. It has genuine reach among younger audiences and targeting capabilities television cannot match. But it plays its role as a digital video platform, and advertisers and their agencies should plan and buy it on that basis, trading against metrics that reflect genuine engagement and demanding independent measurement to the standard applied to every broadcast and streaming competitor.
Benjamin’s headline asked the right question. But the answer was obvious and emphatic long before the latest YouTube “viewing” definition changes gave the industry yet another reason to stop pretending otherwise.
Paul Evans is the founder and chief positioning engineer at V2RSION