For the first time, people in the US watch more YouTube on TV than on mobile. The number of channels earning from viewing on TV screens rose by 45% over the past year. CEO Neal Mohan has therefore described creators as the new stars and, at the same time, as new studios.
In the US, a historic moment came in 2025, when YouTube recorded more viewing on television than on mobile. According to Nielsen data, it now accounts for more than 13% of all TV viewing in America. A platform that began as a place for quick scrolling on a phone has thus gradually become one of the main TV offerings. And its further development, along with its new features, is now being adapted to exactly that.
As much attention, as much money? Not yet
Over the past year, the number of YouTube channels earning six-figure sums from viewing on TV screens grew by more than 45%. YouTube says that over the past few years it has paid more than $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies. In the US alone, according to the company, the platform’s ecosystem contributed around $55 billion to the economy in 2024 and supported more than 490,000 jobs.
These numbers are not accidental. CEO Neal Mohan cites them in his letter, in a context where he wants to convince advertisers, politicians and traditional media that YouTube is not a platform for tinkerers, but infrastructure. And infrastructure is valued differently. For creators this means one specific thing: content on YouTube stops being seen as social video and starts being compared with television inventory. But that does not yet hold in terms of money. Creators’ content on TV screens sells at a 60 to 75% lower CPM than comparable premium television inventory. The attention is there. The money is not yet.
When a video becomes a show
Moving to TV screens is not a cosmetic change. It is a production challenge. A creator who optimised content for mobile scrolling was working with a different viewer. The mobile viewer scrolls, skips and looks for an instant hit. The TV viewer has chosen and settled in. They expect a rhythm that gives them time to orient themselves, not a series of jumps that keeps them constantly on edge.
YouTube is therefore introducing a Shows feature, which organises episodic content into clear collections suited to binge-watching on a TV screen. It has also raised the thumbnail image size limit from 2 MB to 50 MB, to allow 4K thumbnails that are readable on a large screen. Contextual search on TVs now shows, when searching from a channel, primarily that creator’s content rather than results from all of YouTube. Each of these features pushes creators to think like television producers, not only like authors of viral content.
Fragmentation as both a challenge and an advantage
YouTube’s shift to TV screens is happening globally, but the European context adds a layer that is missing from the American discussion. The local market is fragmented by language. A creator making content in Czech, Slovak or Polish cannot benefit from global algorithmic reach in the same way as an English-speaking creator with access to a homogeneous audience of hundreds of millions of people.
The TV format, however, partly softens this asymmetry. A viewer who switches YouTube on in the living room is more willing to watch a longer programme in a language they know well, with faces they trust. YouTube supports more than 100 countries, and local creators’ content increasingly travels across language borders thanks to subtitles and automatic dubbing, which the platform is testing. For European creators, the TV format is an opportunity that did not exist in the mobile world.
The question is not whether YouTube is the new television. That has already been decided. The question is whether creators will start working as television producers before the platform starts requiring it of them as a condition.
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