Nielsen recently corrected their streaming measurement metric, The Gauge, so that YouTube’s impressive stats no longer include viewers of their YouTube TV virtual MVPD.
And yet, as per Nielsen, YouTube continues to be the number one app that viewers are watching on their actual television sets.
This confounded many in the industry (myself included) as we’d assumed that most YouTube viewing was happening on a phone, not a television set and that much of what Nielsen was counting as YouTube’s TV viewing was from their vMVPD.
We were wrong.
That said, the industry has not taken this news sitting down. There has been much backlash of late about how YouTube is not really “TV.”
But is it?
It’s a tricky question, made even more complex by the fact that YouTube has a range of programming on offer, some of which is definitely “TV,” but much of which is debatable.
Add Next TV to your Twitter feed today! Follow @ThisIsNextTV to keep up to date on the latest business and technology news of the video entertainment industry
How much of each there is and what percentage of viewing they constitute is a number Google is keeping to itself.
For now, anyway.
How Do We Define ‘TV’?
The real question, of course, is how do we define what is considered “TV” and what is not.
The usual definition, one I’ve also heard from the likes of the VAB, is “professionally produced, long-form content ( i.e., longer than 20 minutes).”
That is pretty much exactly what I have been telling clients who ask.
It’s a definition that puts most of what is on YouTube today squarely into the “not TV” category.
Most, but not all, which is the issue.
Terms like “professionally produced” are especially squishy now that the cost of high quality cameras and lighting have come down.
But it’s more than that.
There is a lot of content on YouTube (and this is not new) that I’ll call “pro-am” (professional-amateur). It’s made by people who have worked on network TV shows as writers, actors, directors, cinematographers, camera operators and editors. These folks often belong to the unions associated with those roles. Their content is often episodic. And if those episodes are not quite 20 minutes, they’re often pretty darn close.
So do we call that “TV” or “not TV”? Professionally-produced or UGC?
It’s a real gray area and the question is not as purely theoretical as it might seem.
With the upfront/newfront season upon us, brands and agencies are trying to figure out how to plan their budgets. And the question continually comes up: is YouTube part of our “TV” budget, is it part of our “digital video” budget and should those even be separate budgets these days?
I used to answer that question by saying that it depends which device the programming in question is primarily watched on -- a phone or a TV set? They are, after all, markedly different experiences.
But YouTube doesn’t fit neatly into that answer.
In addition to all the “pro-am” content, YouTube also recently launched its own FAST service, featuring both linear and on-demand programming, almost exclusively network reruns. They also have a sizable TVOD library of recent Hollywood movies.
The thing is, no one seems to have any idea what percentage of YouTube viewing these various TV-like options constitute. But given that Nielsen seems to indicate that people are watching more YouTube on their actual TV sets than they are Netflix, it’s fair to assume that it’s probably not nothing.
(Or is it? It is, of course, possible that people are watching cat videos on their 65-inch TV sets, though I somehow doubt it.)
Having Their Cake And Eating It, Too
So what’s an advertiser to do?
The easy solution lies in the hands of a party that has zero vested interest in solving it: Google.
If Google were to separate out viewing numbers for connected TV and let the industry know what programming was actually being viewed on TV (and by who), none of this would be an issue.
But doing so would likely mean they would no longer be able to sell across the entire YouTube universe, and why would they want to do that?
It would also mean they’d need to subject themselves to the sorts of formats and measurement standards that the rest of the streaming TV industry adheres to (kind of, sort of) rather than the standards and measurements they’ve created for themselves.
Or, to put it in simpler terms, Google currently gets to enjoy the benefits of being considered part of both the “digital video” bucket and the “TV” bucket, and so why do anything to mess that up?
At some point it may indeed come to pass that advertisers put the screws on Google and force them to divulge who is watching what on YouTube and on what device.
Or that brands decide that it makes no sense to make these distinctions, and that they should adopt an omni-channel plan for all video advertising.
Both are equally possible, as is the most likely solution, which is to not mess with the status quo. (This is the TV industry we are talking about after all.)
Research Needed
The ideal solution, at least from where I’m sitting, would be to get an understanding of how consumers regard these various kinds of video formats.
Is it all just “video”? Do consumers, like advertisers and media companies, distinguish between “TV” and “not TV” (short-form video) and is that distinction based on the type of content itself or just the device the content is viewed on?
Does that distinction vary widely by age? Region? The type of content they are likely to view?
The answer to those questions would seem to be the best way to determine how advertisers look at YouTube and all digital video for that matter.
So how come no one is asking them?
