Media analyst Maria Rua Aguete replied on LinkedIn to an article in The Economist that had quoted her with the line “Is #Netflix losing the plot? Not so fast!” YouTube wins on hours watched on American TVs, but Netflix lives mainly off subscriptions, which are growing above the company's expectations this year, while its advertising is falling short of plan. Netflix's revenue for the third quarter of 2026 rose 12% to $12.9 billion.
The day after that earnings report, The Economist ran an article whose standfirst said the rise of YouTube has shifted the ground under the streamer's feet. The latest US edition of Nielsen's The Gauge, for August 2026, gave YouTube a record 15.8% of time spent on TV screens and Netflix 7.7%. Overall TV viewing in the US fell in August.
Rua Aguete, who heads global media and entertainment analysis at the research firm Omdia, separates viewing time from money. According to her post, reach, viewing time, monetisation and viewer preference get mixed up in the Netflix versus YouTube debate, even though they are not the same thing. She asks since when slower growth has been a sign that a company is failing. The line of hers that made it into the weekly's article was “People watch YouTube but they pay for Netflix.”
Netflix ads are absent in Czechia and behind plan elsewhere
In Czechia, Netflix is paid for by subscription only, and advertisers cannot reach Czech viewers on it, because the company does not offer its ad-supported plan there. Netflix has announced it will extend the plan to more countries from 2027, including Poland and Austria within the EU. Czechia is not on the list. In neighbouring Poland, Nielsen's household panel measured 2.3% of TV screen time for YouTube and 1.5% for Netflix in September 2026.
On advertising, Netflix was still expecting to roughly double its revenue to about $3 billion in July 2026. In October it cut its full-year estimate to around $2.7 billion. The reason is a slightly slower rollout of some advertising tools. Netflix's leadership presented the results in a live video on YouTube, the rival that has overtaken it on American TVs. There, co-CEO Greg Peters said the ads business is currently a bit behind this year's aggressive target.
YouTube also sells ads to advertisers, and in the second quarter of 2026 ads brought it $11.1 billion, up 13% year on year. Its parent company, Alphabet, does not report YouTube Premium subscriptions and other services separately, but counts them in an aggregate line together with Google's subscriptions and devices. The two platforms' total revenue cannot be compared from the filings. Creators in the YouTube Partner Programme get a share of revenue from ads on the watch page and in the Shorts feed, as well as from Premium subscriptions when subscribers watch their content.
Netflix wants to be judged on revenue and operating profit
In its July letter to shareholders, Netflix announced that from 2027 its What We Watched viewing report will be published only once a year, to keep the focus on its primary financial metrics, revenue and operating profit. The same letter says that not all hours are equal and that, alongside time, quality and variety also matter. Even so, co-CEO Peters claimed in the earnings video that American subscribers pay Netflix less per hour of viewing than they pay any other subscription service in the US.
In its October letter to shareholders, Netflix itself acknowledged investor concern about its view hours growth. Churn, the rate at which subscribers cancel, improved year on year in the third quarter, both globally and in the US. Yet CFO Spence Neumann said in the live earnings video, “we want to grow view hours faster. We're not satisfied.”
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