The year of YouTube: What happens when the side door becomes the front door?

Opinion

The opportunity on YouTube is not simply to make big numbers bigger. It is to turn global attention into durable brand value, writes BBC Studios’ SVP of digital.

There are moments in media when something quietly stops being a trend and starts being the room we are all standing in.

For years, parts of the industry have treated YouTube as an adjacent space. Useful, enormous, slightly inconvenient. It was where clips lived. Where creators lived. Where marketing teams put trailers. Where audiences were, yes, but not necessarily where “proper television” was supposed to happen.

That position is becoming harder to maintain without sounding like someone insisting email is a fad.

Pedro Pina’s MacTaggart Lecture at Edinburgh (pictured) felt significant not because YouTube turned up at the television industry’s most symbolic lectern and said, “Hello, we are big.” We knew that. It mattered because the argument was no longer about whether YouTube sits outside television. It was about whether television can still afford to define itself without YouTube in the centre of the map.

His thesis was optimistic: British television is not in decline, audiences have not vanished, and platforms and broadcasters do not need to behave like rival tribes fighting over the last canapé at an industry drinks reception. The next era, he argued, could be a third golden age if we meet audiences on their terms.

That is the bit worth sitting with: the “on their terms” bit.

The real strategic tension now sits with broadcasters

We have brilliant IP. We have trusted brands. We have global storytelling, talent, editorial quality, and catalogues that most media companies would commit crimes for. But none of that guarantees attention anymore. Attention has to be earned where audiences spend their time, in the formats they choose, with the cadence they expect, and with enough respect for the platform that we are not simply chopping up television and calling it a digital strategy.

That is the uncomfortable little gift of the Year of YouTube. It forces a better question.

Not: should we be on YouTube? Obviously yes. Please see also: electricity.

The question is: what are we building there?

Are we using YouTube as a shop window, or as a fandom engine? Are we optimising for reach, or for return? Are we treating creators as promotional garnish, or as part of the creative and commercial architecture?

This is where the recent change to YouTube’s public view metric is interesting. A view now increasingly tells us that something started. It doesn’t tell us whether someone stayed, cared, returned, shared, subscribed, bought, booked, watched another episode, or developed the sort of emotional attachment that eventually turns into commercial value.

And yes, bigger view numbers will look lovely in press releases. Media loves a large number. We see one and immediately start looking for a font size that says “historic”.

But if we are serious about building long-term value from IP, we have to be more disciplined than that. Reach is distribution. Attention is behaviour. Fandom is relationship. All connected, but not the same thing.

For BBC Studios, the opportunity on YouTube is not simply to make big numbers bigger. It is to turn global attention into durable brand value.

Last year, audiences spent 2.1bn hours watching BBC Studios content on YouTube. That is the number I care about because it represents time people chose to spend with our content. Time is the scarce currency. Everyone gets 24 hours. Nobody gets 100m of them. A viewer saw you. A fan came back.

And if Pedro’s MacTaggart tells us anything, it is that the old hierarchy between television and platforms is collapsing faster than some parts of the industry are comfortable admitting.

YouTube is not just where television content is distributed. It is where audiences discover, revisit, remix, discuss and deepen their relationship with IP. For many younger audiences, it is not a second screen. It is THE screen.

That does not diminish broadcasters or studios. It makes their role more important. But only if we stop treating digital as downstream of “the real thing”.

For BBC Studios, the prize is clear. YouTube can extend the life of our shows, build always-on audiences, create new commercial formats, support franchise growth, deepen affinity, and bring British storytelling to global audiences at a scale few other routes can match. But to do that properly, we have to build for the platform, not merely upload to it.

That means thinking about packaging, cadence, community, talent, monetisation, rights, data, formats, sales and fandom together. It means not separating “content strategy” from “commercial strategy” as if audiences politely organise themselves around our internal operating model. They do not. Rude of them, but there we are.

It also means being honest about what YouTube represents commercially now. It is no longer just a marketing channel, a catch-up shelf, or a place to gather incremental revenue from archive. It is a strategic route to audience growth, brand building and new monetisation.

Not just: how many views did it get?

But: who watched, for how long, what did they do next, what did it make them feel, and can we build a business around that behaviour?

This is not about choosing YouTube over television. That is a false fight, and frankly we have enough real ones. It is about recognising that the audience journey no longer respects the borders we built between platforms, departments or business models. 

A child may meet Bluey on YouTube, watch the series elsewhere, buy the book, go to the live show and then return to YouTube for another compilation before breakfast. That is not fragmentation. That is a franchise behaving like a franchise.

To win the next phase, companies need to understand that loop and design for it.

So yes, celebrate the view count. Enjoy the big number. Put it on the slide if you must. I am not made of stone.

But if 2026 is the Year of YouTube, the real lesson is not that the numbers are getting bigger. It is that the centre of gravity has moved.

For BBC Studios, that should be energising. We have the brands, the stories and the audience trust. The opportunity now is to build the operating model, creative muscle and commercial ambition to match the reality of where audiences already are.

Because the side door is no longer the side door.

It might be the front door, the living room, the fan club and, on a good day, the shop.

Jasmine Dawson is the SVP of digital at BBC Studios