Behind surging revenue and consumer attention for Alphabet’s YouTube is a shift in the physical location where much of the service’s viewing now takes place. Increasingly, the catch-all video repository is getting serious traction not from PCs and mobile phones, but from its presence on TV sets. And for that, YouTube has the pay TV industry at least partly to thank.
As of 2023 TV sets fed by cable set-top boxes and connected TV devices are said to account for more than one-third of total viewing of YouTube in the U.S., with that number steadily rising as viewing over alternative screens — mobile devices and desktop or laptop PCs — shrinks. Industry watcher eMarketer believes U.S. YouTube viewing over computers will slip to slightly under 13% of viewing time by 2024 compared with more than 16% in 2020. Mobile viewing, in turn, is projected to fall to 48.5% from 53.1% in 2020.
