ITV finds incremental reach on YouTube
The Future of Audio and Entertainment 2025
Five months after ITV and YouTube agreed a new partnership deal to bring full episodes of ITV programmes to the platform, the broadcaster is seeing incremental audience reach without cannabalisation.
According to Abul Noor, ITV’s head of YouTube sales, by expanding its distribution strategy to include YouTube, the broadcaster has picked up 2-4% incremental audience reach.
“Once you get into the top end [of reach curves] at 80%+, finding 2-4% in addition to that is really compelling,” he told The Media Leader at last month’s Future of Audio and Entertainment conference at County Hall in London.
“The more people watching, the more people that can discover that content, the more we can offer our advertisers from a commercial point of view.”
Noor was flanked by YouTube’s UKI and EMEA head of MediaCo and responsibility partnerships Mairi Brewis, and Graham Haigh, COO of ITV’s digital subsidiary Zoo 55.
According to Brewis, the opportunity for mutually beneficial distribution partnerships between YouTube and public-service broadcasters has increased as YouTube has become “ever more present in the living room and on connected TVs”.
“It is incremental,” Haigh added. “It’s difficult to get some of these audiences just by having a linear channel and ITVX.”
Watch the full conversation:
Not a ‘lift-and-shift’ approach to content
Brewis and Haigh noted that ITV and YouTube have had a long-standing relationship over a decade, but that the latest partnership is an “iteration” focused on “driving new and incremental audiences” via a data-led approach.
Since the partnership was agreed in December, ITV has launched six new YouTube channels, each centred around appealing to particular niches based on audience data.
“It’s not about taking a lift-and-shift approach with ITVX and putting it onto YouTube,” Haigh explained. “It’s very much a curated, data-led approach to content”.
As Brewis described, ITV has taken a focus that “taps into those particular audiences that they’re finding incremental on YouTube”.
She noted that, in general, factual content and podcasts have performed well on the platform. However, in some markets such as Turkey, Latin America and MENA, soap operas and telenovellas have had significant success, suggesting there is room for more drama-centred programmes to succeed in the future.
There is also potential for international growth via YouTube that the broadcasters would otherwise struggle to achieve, Brewis argued. “It’s so easy to tap into those wider audiences outside the UK on YouTube. That’s one of the things we’ve also seen with ITV — that things you might have thought were a bit more UK-specific actually have a large interest from outside the country as well”.
FELT strategy
According to Noor, the incrementality of YouTube viewership has allowed ITV’s commercial team to so far be “platform agnostic” when selling its inventory.
The conversation with clients, he indicated, has moved away from whether ITV should sell YouTube inventory differently, to how ITV can support brands in effectively delivering campaigns according to their objectives.
“YouTube now forms part of that mix for us,” he said, adding that “the heart of what we’re selling on YouTube doesn’t differ greatly to what we’re selling on broadcast or streaming” because the content “remains brilliant” no matter whether it is consumed via one distribution platform or another.
‘Fit for TV’ YouTube channels drive higher ad attention than non-premium video
Recent research from attention measurement company Amplified Intelligence in collaboration with Vevo found that YouTube content that meets Barb’s “fit for TV” standard drives 40% more active attention on adjacent ads than less premium videos on the platform. To that end, Noor expressed confidence that advertisers “understand that premium content retains itself” on YouTube, regardless of whether a consumer is watching via mobile, desktop or CTV.
Perhaps just as important to retaining interest from existing advertisers is growing the pool of potential clients for the broadcaster. As ITV’s commercial MD Kelly Williams told a crowd at LEAD 2025 in January, there is substantial opportunity for ITV to chase the “fat end of the long tail” (FELT).
YouTube has helped make that a possibility, according to Noor.
“YouTube enables us to partner with more digital-first brands that haven’t considered TV content, for whatever reason, in their marketing mix,” he said, pointing to brands like E.l.f. Cosmetics and Carmoola as new-to-ITV advertisers that have been attracted to its YouTube inventory.
“It enables them to partner with ITV in an avenue that wasn’t possible before,” Noor continued. “As a net positive, we’re finding more brands coming to us.”
Land grab?
Even so, some analysts have warned that broadcasters risk undermining their own long-term business models if they become reliant on platforms like YouTube for audience engagement.
As Ian Whittaker put it at last December’s Future of TV Advertising Global event, “TV is falling into the newspaper trap.”
“If you look at what happened with the newspapers 15 years ago, what they did was believe they had to give into the demands of the tech players. That in terms of their own agency, they didn’t have that much,” Whittaker said. “They turned around and said: ‘Our content — we have to give away for free. We need to move away from our core product.’ What happened to newspapers? From an advertising perspective, they declined into irrelevance.”
When asked to respond to such criticism, Brewis replied: “The idea that YouTube is taking and controlling and owning things is misleading.”
“We’re a distribution platform,” she continued, noting that ITV receives the majority of revenue from selling against its YouTube inventory, as is true of other partners.
“It’s up to ITV to choose what they put on YouTube. They continue to retain absolutely full editorial control. If they want to stop or take things down at any point, that’s up to ITV. And we are delighted to partner with them because we see huge benefits of working closer together.
“The idea that it’s YouTube making a land grab at our partner’s expense isn’t how we see it. We succeed where our partners succeed.”
Noor added that ITV made a “very considered move into this space”, noting it maintains full control over its ads sales on the platform.
“The only way you can partner with ITV content directly is via us. We work with Mairi and the team to make sure where we succeed together, it’s not at the cost of anyone else.”