Barb begins reporting TV-set viewing of YouTube channels
Barb has begun reporting TV-set viewing of YouTube channels in what it claims is a global first.
The TV joint-industry measurement company worked with SeeViews, an independent business that specialises in planning ad campaigns on YouTube, to select 200 of the most-watched channels on the platform to become part of its regular audience reporting.
The included channels span a wide variety of interests and topics and encompass both professionally produced and user-generated content, but represent just a fraction of total YouTube viewing.
YouTubers MrBeast, Topper Guild and the Sidemen are now being independently measured, alongside the official channels for Bluey and Peppa Pig; sports bodies like Fifa and WWE; UK and international news and political commentary like Fox News, Times News and MeidasTouch; entertainment like Doctor Who, Warner Bros Entertainment, Sony Pictures and Universal Pictures; and gaming publisher IGN.
The selection was based primarily on volumes of viewing and considered whether the channels meet industry-agreed standards for brand safety, according to a Barb spokesperson.
It comes as Ofcom’s annual Media Nations report, released Wednesday, found the platform is the second most-watched service in the UK, behind the BBC and ahead of ITV. The regulator further found that YouTube is the most popular first TV destination for generation Alpha.
Classifications and caveats
As per Barb’s methodology, it is only able to report on viewing captured on TV sets in the UK. It will also only report on videos that exceed two minutes in length.
This is because Barb uses ACR audio-matching to track viewing on TV sets, which has created a number of necessary caveats for tracking audiences on YouTube.
For example, due to the nature of the platform, many channels Barb is tracking will post videos that could also be uploaded by other accounts, and which could thus create false-positives for Barb’s measurement. These could include, for example, movie trailers, which may also be played as ads on other videos.
Barb will thus tend to overestimate audience levels for channels with lower levels of exclusive content as well as channels that upload videos with shorter watch times.
Of further note, Kantar Media, which runs Barb’s measurement panel, is only tracking new videos posted on the 200 YouTube channels from the beginning of April this year. That means that Barb is likely to underestimate audience levels of channels that are heavily used to watch archive content (i.e., any video posted before April).
As such, Barb has grouped the 200 channels by “duration/exclusivity” indicators to provide a guide on how comparable a channel’s audience data is relative to the rest of Barb’s linear and streaming measurement — effectively providing a confidence interval. Channels with high levels of exclusive content with most videos exceeding two minutes in length (MrBeast, for example) are given the A1 classification, denoting high confidence. This is followed by B2 and C3 classifications for increasingly less “exclusive” and shorter-form content.
“We are constantly innovating to keep pace with what people are watching today, without being constrained by the platforms or devices people watch on,” said Barb chief operating officer Caroline Baxter. “We’ve gone beyond linear to report audiences to BVOD services, and we’ve gone beyond broadcasters to report audiences to streamers.
“Now, using the same techniques we’ve been using for many years to report audiences to programmes on linear channels and streaming services, we’re breaking new ground again.
“This fresh, independent insight will shine a light on what people watch on YouTube for the first time, starting to answer the questions that are being asked across the advertising, programming and regulatory parts of our industry”.
Initial takeaways
In an example of weekly viewing figures for the top 20 channels for the week ending 20 July viewed by The Media Leader, Barb indicated many channels that are widely perceived as maintaining large audiences in fact had relatively minor audience reach — at least, on TV sets in the UK.
MrBeast, for example, was shown to reach just 0.5% of UK individuals over the age of four — equivalent to 319,000 viewers who spent just under 8m combined minutes watching his channel. His share of total TV viewership for the week was thus 0.01%.
Such reach is comparable to Really’s The Yorkshire Auction House, according to data viewed by The Media Leader, though MrBeast’s demographic breakdown is sure to skew much younger.
Still, the only channel from the cross section of data shared with The Media Leader that reached more than 1% of British audiences was the official channel for Peppa Pig (1.2%, or 758,000 individuals).
Indeed, young children’s content dominated TV-set viewing, accounting for 14 of the top 20 channels measured by Barb.
The biggest channel not apparently directed at toddlers or adolescents, Universal Pictures All-Access, received 562,000 weekly viewers, a figure comparable to ITV’s Good Morning Britain.
Only the top three channels measured by Barb achieved audience reach in excess of 500,000 on TV sets.
Greater transparency
The launch of TV-set viewing measurement of YouTube channels comes just days after The Media Leader reported YouTube had stopped subscribing to Barb as of the beginning of the month.
YouTube has been a core focus for Barb’s audience measurement innovation efforts amid an expandion of insights beyond broadcast TV, especially as the platform has begun positioning itself as a TV player rather than merely a social platform.
Barb data show that TV sets account for the largest proportion of in-home, WiFi-based YouTube viewing. In Q2 this year, TV-set viewing accounted for 43% of all such YouTube viewing among people aged 16+, ahead of smartphones (32%). TV sets are also the most popular device for children aged 4-15, accounting for 53% of their in-home, WiFi-based YouTube viewing in the same quarter.
Barb has reported reach and time spent viewing YouTube (but not specific channels) on TV sets since 2021.
YouTube has long laid claim to large overall audience figures across desktop, mobile and TV, and has previously partnered with Nielsen, UKOM and AudienceProject, as well as cross-media measurement initiative Origin, for third-party measurement.
Nielsen’s monthly US TV viewing update, The Gauge, has consistently ranked YouTube as the most-watched streaming service on US TVs for the past several quarters.
At Cannes last month, YouTube CEO Neil Mohan claimed Shorts, the platform’s TikTok-like short-form video competitor, also averages over 200bn daily views — equivalent to every person in the world watching 25 Shorts per day.
But in March, as contributor Omar Oakes pointed out in The Media Leader, YouTube quietly changed how Shorts views were counted. Previously, a “view” was only counted after a video was watched for a “certain number of seconds”. Now a view on Shorts is counted as soon as the video starts to play or replay.
For its part, YouTube claims it counts both earned and organic views on long-form videos when a user watches a video for 10 seconds.
No-one knows whether YouTube is TV or social — not even YouTube