Barb’s first 7 weeks of YouTube channel data reveals over-indexing of child audiences
Measuring the effectiveness of advertising on YouTube “lacks context” and is opaque without third-party measurement, attendees of a Barb briefing call heard on Tuesday.
The overall YouTube TV set reach for the final week of August was just short of 22m people (aged four-plus).
“Significant, for sure, but not quite as large as the reach for BBC One, ITV1 or Netflix for the same week on a TV set,” said Barb head of insight Doug Whepdale, who hosted the call.
Whelpdale revealed further data from the first seven weeks of Barb’s effort to measure TV set viewing of specific YouTube channels.
It which showed continued evidence that YouTube viewing on UK TV sets is drastically skewed towardd younger viewers and that global phenomenons such as MrBeast actually have rather small audiences in this market.
During the call, Barb also announced that its new Barb Ads Hub will begin user testing in late October, ahead of a launch in January. The hub will feature a “modern, intuitive interface” aimed at uniting its Advanced Campaign Hub and CFlight, the latter of which will also receive an upgrade.
Two as-yet-unidentified subscription VOD services will also be added to the campaign measurement tool next year.
Viewing skews to kids and heavy viewers
In a world-first in the summer, Barb began reporting TV set viewing of a cross-section of 200 YouTube channels. It has reported platform-wide viewing figures since November 2021.
During the last week of August, those 200 YouTube channels reached just over 7m people on TV sets. The official YouTube channel for Peppa Pig remained the top channel measured by Barb in each of its first seven weeks of channel measurement, with just under 1m viewing weekly.
In each of those seven weeks, between 12 and 14 channels of the top 20 tracked by Barb could be reasonably classified as being aimed at a young audience.
“We’ve already seen what an important audience kids are for YouTube at a service level and that remains the case when we are analysing the 200 channels that we are measuring at a content level,” said Whelpdale.
Across the 200 channels that Barb is measuring at a content-level, they collectively reach 1.9m kids on average each week, equivalent to one in five children in the UK. Across the first seven weeks of Barb’s YouTube channel reporting, nearly half of kids were reached by those channels.
Of those, the most-watched video was the end scene of Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, as shown by the JoBlo Animated Videos channel. Its audience of 432,000 was about the same as an episode of Chicago Fire on Sky Witness that week, Whelpdale noted.
For Peppa Pig, the top channel, if Barb were to place its reach on YouTube on TV sets against all other Barb-measured services for the week ending 31 August, it would come in just ahead of the 72nd-ranked channel, True Crime Extra. JoBlo Animated Videos, which ranked 10th, would come in just ahead of Clubland TV, which ranked 124th on that same list.
However, Peppa Pig’s viewership on YouTube does compare favourably to its reach on Channel 5 (just under 700,000 weekly viewers) and on Netflix (just under 200,000 viewers).
When considering how public-service broadcaster content is performing on YouTube, Barb has found that, by overall reach, ITV1 content on YouTube would have ranked third among Barb’s 200 measured channels in the last week of August. Sky Sports, Sky News and GB News also would have ranked in the top 10 that week.
According to Barb data, more than two-thirds (68%) of viewing time on YouTube TV sets comes from under-35s, of whom there is an almost 50-50 split between viewers aged under 16 and those aged 16-34.
Whelpdale therefore called young viewers “disproportionately important” to YouTube on a TV set. Children were found to account for 27% of viewing time in Q2, despite those aged four and over accounting for only 15% of the total UK population. In comparison, consumers aged 16-55 index closer to average, while 55-plus viewers are “unsurprisingly under-indexing” on YouTube viewing on a TV set.
As has been previously found, YouTube viewership is also skewed dramatically towards its heaviest users. While this is also true of broadcasters (78% of viewing time comes from “heavy viewers”), the issue is even more pronounced on YouTube, with 91% of viewing time coming from heavy viewers.
Importantly, TV set viewing of YouTube has nevertheless become more common. On TV sets, video-sharing platforms have grown from 4% of viewing in 2022 to 9% this year, with YouTube the clear driver of this behaviour.
However, viewing behaviours are also distinct between YouTube and broadcast/streaming platforms throughout the day. YouTube has been found to see a viewership bump after the end of the school day at around 3pm. However, Barb did not find significantly higher viewership between 6pm and 9pm, when broadcasters typically see an evening peak.
Such data lends further credence to the idea that children are driving YouTube viewership, Whelpdale noted. Moreover, there has been a “marked shift” in viewing share by device; whereas three years ago there was a near-equal share of viewing YouTube on TV sets and tablets, TV sets now account for the majority of kids’ in-house YouTube viewing.
“Minutes spent viewing YouTube on PCs is down 62% for under-11s, while time on tablets is down 16% and on smartphones down 12%. Minutes spent viewing YouTube on a TV set are up 65% for this age group and have doubled for kids aged 11-15,” Whelpdale explained.
“Our hypothesis is that parents may be more comfortable for their kids to watch YouTube on the TV set, as this is a communal screen and so it’s easier to monitor what their kids are watching.”
Local nuance
Whelpdale called MrBeast’s audience figures particularly “revealing”. The world’s most-subscribed YouTuber has “undoubtedly impressive” global subscriber figures (442m), with each video receiving tens if not hundreds of millions of views, according to YouTube.
But those figures “don’t reveal his audience in the UK”, Whelpdale pointed out: “Not to mention the fact that the duration threshold for a view to be counted on YouTube is uncertain and may be just a few seconds.”
In the UK on TV sets, MrBeast’s channel reach peaks of just over 300,000 weekly viewers or just under 1.2m across the first seven weeks Barb collected channel-specific YouTube data. One of his videos, which YouTube labelled as having 113m views by 9 September, reached just under half a million people on UK TV sets over the same period.
“It’s human nature to be impressed by a big number and assume that a good proportion of that viewing is in the UK,” said Whelpdale. “After all, we’re constantly hearing about the scale of various YouTube creators, although usually without explicit mention of the fact that the scale is global or an open explanation of how that scale is calculated.
“This is why independent and transparent measurement of these services matters to our industry.”
A spokesperson for YouTube disputed the veracity of Barb’s measurement effort. They told The Media Leader: “YouTube does not have a direct integration with Barb and there are limitations to their recent reporting as their curated list of 200 channels is not representative of YouTube viewing.
“In the UK we have an integration with Ipsos/Iris which provides accurate reporting on YouTube watchtime, and we also partner with third parties including Nielsen, Audience Project and ISBA’s Origin measurement service. In May 2025 Ipsos found that 47.9 million people in the UK aged over 18 watched YouTube including spending 36 minutes a day watching YouTube on Connected TV.”
Whelpdale continued: “To enable the assessment of campaign effectiveness, there’s a need for comparable impact data across all brand-safe content. False equivalents, by which I mean words like ‘reach’ and ‘exposure’, or ‘impact’ and ‘impression’, that look and sound the same while having different meanings, is a deterrent to the assessment of effective investment in media advertising.”
In contrast to MrBeast’s relatively meagre audience on UK TV sets, his competition show on Amazon Prime Video, Beast Games, received five times the audience, according to Barb data.
Similarly, Ms Rachel, a popular education-centred creator who has a deal with Netflix, was also found to have six times the size of her audience on the streaming platform than on YouTube.
Editor’s note: This article has been amended since publication.
A prior version of this article incorrectly stated that Barb has been reporting platform-wide viewing figures of YouTube on TV sets since August 2022. In fact, it has conducted such reporting since November 2021, across all four screens. The prior version also stated that Beast Games received five times the reach of MrBeast’s YouTube video; this is true of audience, not reach.
The article has also been edited to include comment from a YouTube spokesperson.