YouTube Reaches a Record 15.8 Percent of US TV Viewing
YouTube captured a platform-record 15.8 percent of US TV viewing in August 2026, according to Nielsen's August Gauge report, published October 22. Its monthly viewing climbed 6 percent, keeping it in first place in the Gauge. Over the same month, overall streaming usage fell 3.2 percent and total TV usage fell 4.4 percent.
The Gauge is Nielsen's monthly measure of how viewing time is divided among platforms on the television set.
The figure follows a strong July. Engadget's July breakdown reports that YouTube accounted for 14.2 percent of US TV viewing that month, the largest share of any platform, while streaming as a whole took 49 percent of all TV time. Netflix held 7.8 percent. Disney's Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ combined for 4.7 percent, and Prime Video for 4.2 percent.
Further down the July ranking, The Roku Channel reached 2.9 percent, ahead of Peacock at 2.6 percent. Paramount's services, including Paramount+ and Pluto TV, accounted for 2.2 percent. Tubi posted 2.0 percent, ahead of HBO Max and discovery+ at 1.4 percent. Peacock's viewing time rose 15 percent in July compared with June. Love Island USA logged 4.9 billion viewing minutes in the month.
Grouped by distributor rather than platform, The Hollywood Reporter's chart lists YouTube at 15.8 percent, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery combined at 12.1 percent, Disney at 9.3 percent and Netflix at 7.7 percent. The distributor view consolidates corporate siblings, which is why Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery appear together and Disney's total is larger than any single streaming app's share.
Earlier in the year, YouTube led Nielsen's Media Distributor Gauge in May with 13.8 percent of TV viewing. Nielsen's mid-year streaming rankings, posted in late August, named Stranger Things the top title after the series ended its run.
Nielsen's Gauge tracks viewing time on TV sets. It does not count subscriber totals, app downloads or viewing on phones. Streaming figures are derived from a subset of Streaming Meter-enabled TV households. Live channels watched through YouTube TV, a vMVPD (a virtual pay-TV bundle delivered over the internet), are counted as broadcast or cable viewing, not as YouTube's streaming share. The platform's figure therefore captures only its on-demand and creator content on the TV screen.
A platform that carries live linear channels through a vMVPD subscription and also hosts an enormous library of user-generated video will not map cleanly onto a catalogue-driven service such as Netflix. The Gauge measures attention on the television, and the figures do not tell us how much of that attention was paid for, or how it was monetised.
The broader context here is a shift in where the living-room screen gets its content. The Gauge data show streaming taking nearly half of all TV time in July, while total TV usage declined in August. Whether that decline reflects a change in habits or simply a seasonal dip is a question the monthly figures cannot answer on their own. The next several Gauge releases will show whether YouTube's August gain holds, and whether streaming's share holds up as total viewing settles into the autumn schedule.
