📺 YouTube Rules The Streaming World

In today’s newsletter I discuss how YouTube rules the streaming world, consumers will spend an estimated $1 trillion dollars this holiday season, Coinbase is getting in on speculative initial coin offerings in time for the crypto markets to make a comeback, Nike and Palace Skateboards have opened an indoor skatepark called the Manor Place in South London, Google is launching two AI data center satellites powered by solar energy to see if that works out, 1Password just make $400 million dollars in ARR and has a long list of celebrity investors including Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson (who used to be married coincidentally), Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood believes that humanoid robots could be the biggest opportunity in the field of artificial intelligence, and my New York Giants have finally fired head coach Brian Daboll, but for some reason didn’t let their General Manager Joe Schoen who hired him go also ("Big mistake, huge!").

Let’s get into it.

YouTube

Top Story

📺 YouTube Rules The Streaming World

Who do you think is the biggest streaming service in the world? Apple TV+? Amazon Prime Video? Maybe even HBO Max (or whatever they’re calling themselves today). If you guessed Netflix you’d also be wrong. It's YouTube, and it’s not even a close competition.

YouTube is an absolute juggernaut, drawing in a massive global audience. YouTube has over 2.7 billion monthly active users, which accounts for a little over 30% of the world's population. This scale means YouTube's audience is nearly ten times larger than Netflix's subscriber base of approximately 300 million users, and is 38% bigger than rival platform Instagram's active users.

Online users collectively watch over 1 billion hours of video every day on YouTube, which exceeds the daily watch time of any other streaming service. In 2024 alone, YouTube generated approximately $36.1 billion dollars in advertising revenue from those watch hours, marking a 14.6% increase year-on-year from 2023. YouTube's subscription revenue is also a rapidly growing part of its business, primarily driven by YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. YouTube generated an estimated $14.5 billion from its Premium subscription model in 2024. These impressive revenue figures clearly show YouTube’s financial dominance in the streaming world.

YouTube’s success is no longer limited to only the small screen; it's rapidly replacing traditional TV. According to Nielsen, in the United States, YouTube has consistently claimed the largest share of total U.S. TV streaming time, and recently accounted for around 12.5% of all television viewing time. This share is 67% bigger than Netflix’s approximate 7.5% share, and is actually larger than both Netflix and Disney+ combined. By far, YouTube is the single biggest source of video consumption in the U.S.

This dominance is fueled by a breathtaking volume of content and a growing emphasis on high-quality, authentic creation. To fully grasp YouTube's scale, you have to consider this: more than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute worldwide. That translates to approximately 720,000 hours of video content uploaded daily, making YouTube’s platform unparalleled in both size and depth of content. YouTube has built a digital moat that no other streaming service's curated, in-house content library could ever hope to rival. This volume is increasingly vetted for originality, as YouTube has tightened its policies, renaming its "repetitious content" rule to the "inauthentic content" policy in 2025 to ensure creators are rewarded for truly original, high-value work.

YouTube's business model is what really sets it apart from subscription-based competitors like Netflix and Disney+. Instead of producing all the content itself, YouTube relies on the content creator economy. This model, which started with the introduction of the YouTube Partner Program back in 2007, allows anyone to upload video content and then share in the advertising revenue. Eligible creators in the YouTube Partner Program receive 55% of the ad and subscription revenue generated on their videos, with YouTube retaining the remaining 45% of the revenue. This revenue sharing model is unmatched in the industry, and has helped kickstart the entire creator economy, allowing millions of people to build their content creation businesses on the YouTube platform. An Oxford Economics research paper from 2024 shows that YouTube's creative ecosystem contributed over $55 billion dollars to the U.S. GDP and supported more than 490,000 full-time equivalent jobs in the country. This model also results in significantly lower content costs compared to rivals, who spend tens of billions on in-house production. A single million views on a YouTube video can translate to content creators earning between $1,200 and $6,000 dollars from ad revenue alone, although this varies widely by niche and audience location.

The platform's sheer scale is almost incomprehensible, reaching into every corner of the world. The shift in advertising dollars is another massive indicator of the platform's strength, as YouTube advertisements have the potential to reach an audience of 2.53 billion people. This immense ad reach gives YouTube's core ad business a scale that is approximately twelve times bigger than Netflix's nascent advertising segment. Brands are pouring money into content creator ads, seeing a clear return on investment by leveraging the authentic connection creators have with their audience. This is part of a larger creator economy that was valued at $250 billion dollars in 2024 and is projected to double to $500 billion dollars by 2027. This financial ecosystem, which includes ad revenue, merchandise sales, and direct fan payments, means that individual creators are generating nearly six in ten dollars of the market's revenue. Only 30% of independent creators report working full-time, but for those who do, YouTube provides a foundation for a substantial career. Content creators are directly impacting commerce, with over 70% of viewers reporting that they have purchased from a brand after seeing it advertised or featured on YouTube.

Another key factor in its growth is the explosion of YouTube Shorts. This short-form video product, launched in 2020, is a serious competitor to other short-form video platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels. In 2024, YouTube Shorts were averaging over 70 billion daily views. In Q3 of 2025, YouTube Shorts achieved revenue parity with traditional long-form video on a per-watch-hour basis in the United States, which is a huge milestone that confirms its status as a mature, high-value monetization engine rather than just a growth tactic.

YouTube also has an established and rapidly growing subscription model. YouTube Premium and YouTube Music together officially surpassed 125 million paid subscribers globally, generating an estimated $14.5 billion dollars in revenue in 2024. This segment's growth is a strategic financial hedge for the platform, as this stable revenue stream is immune to ad-blockers and brand safety concerns. For top creators, these ad-free viewers now contribute up to 30% of their total monthly revenue, providing a crucial layer of income stability. YouTube has formalized this "twin-engine" model by announcing a payout of over $8 billion dollars to the music industry in the 12 months between July 2024 and June 2025 - a figure fueled by both ads and subscriptions. The platform's global reach is evidenced by its top markets: the largest user base resides in India, and is estimated at over 460 million users in 2024, followed by the United States with over 230 million users. The most successful channels on YouTube show this global reach, with the most subscribed channel, T-Series, being based in India, while the highest individual earner in 2024 was MrBeast, who's based in the United States and has earned an estimated $85 million dollars from his YouTube channels.

YouTube's position as the world's largest streaming service is absolutely secure, driven by its massive global audience of over 2.7 billion monthly active users and its innovative content creation model. By sharing the majority of ad revenue with creators and focusing on a dual-engine model of advertising and high-growth subscriptions, YouTube has cultivated the $250 billion dollar creator economy that continues to attract both individual content creators and major brand advertising dollars. By bringing in $36.1 billion dollars in advertising revenue and $14.5 billion dollars in subscription revenue in 2024, and a staggering 70 billion daily views for their Shorts, YouTube has cemented its standing as the world’s largest streaming platform for not just watching content, but for fueling the content creator economy.

Quick Hits

🎁 Business

It’s estimated that consumers will spend $1 trillion dollars this holiday season for the first time ever. According to the National Retail Federation (NRF) they’re estimating an increase of between 3.7%-4.2% over last year's $976.1 billion dollars in sales.

I know my family will be doing their part to help push holiday spending over $1 trillion dollars this holiday season!

🪙 Crypto

The speculative crypto market is back baby!

Coinbase has launched a new platform to purchase digital tokens before they are listed on the exchange. The new service allows U.S. retail investors to participate in initial coin offerings (ICOs).

Head of trading at Coinbase, Scott Shapiro, says the new system offers a safer path, which is great because everyone knows nothing fuels market stability quite like easier access to prelisted speculation.

🛹 Skateboarding

Nike and Palace Skateboards have opened a sports hub in South London called the Manor Place, and it’s housed in an old 19th-century bathhouse. Architecture studio Jam designed the indoor space, which features a free to use skatepark that can be mechanically lifted up in the air when not in use to transform the space into an underground football pitch called the Cage. They’ve also built out 6 studio spaces for artists, which they call "lunar landers" and are made from timber wrapped in a reflective fabric. How artsy!

🚀 Space

Google has embarked on an ambitious new moonshot called Project Suncatcher, which will explore a scalable AI infrastructure system that utilizes constellations of solar powered satellites. Each satellite will be equipped with TPUs, which stands for Tensor Processing Unit, and is a specialized, custom designed ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) developed by Google to rapidly accelerate the massive matrix calculations and convolutions fundamental to machine learning and deep neural networks. These satellites will be connected by high speed optical links, which initial research has found to be fundamentally sound by confirming radiation tolerance of the TPUs and addressing data center scale inter satellite links.

Got all that?

Google believes that falling launch costs will make the system economically comparable to terrestrial data centers, meaning Google wants to launch solar-powered satellite data centers in space. Google's next step is launching a satellite in 2027 to test prototype hardware and models in space.

🔐 Celebrity Investors

1Password's annual recurring revenue just surpassed $400 million dollars as of November 2025, and a lot of the thanks can go to its A list of celebrities who have invested in the company over the years, including Ryan Reynolds, Scarlett Johansson, Robert Downey Jr, Matthew McConaughey, Chris Evans, Rita Wilson, Ashton Kutcher, Trevor Noah, Justin Timberlake, and Pharrell Williams. This impressive growth follows the company's January 2022 Series C funding round which raised $620 million dollars and gave 1Password a $6.8 billion dollar valuation. Now that they have all that money, they can finally afford to pay someone to remember all those celebrities' passwords.

🤖 Robots

Cathie Wood, founder of Ark Invest, believes that humanoid robots are the biggest opportunity in artificial intelligence, predicting that this market could have a massive revenue potential of $26 trillion dollars and a valuation opportunity up to $70 trillion dollars. Semiconductor giant Nvidia agrees, designing its specialized Isaac GR00T foundation models and Jetson chips to power these "embodied AI" agents for partners like Figure AI, which received $675 million dollars in funding recently. And this whole robotics vision is inline with Tesla CEO Elon Musk's vision, who has stated that Tesla's Optimus humanoid bot, which could be mass produced at a target cost under $30,000 dollars per unit, will eventually account for 80 percent of Tesla's valuation. The future is so bright your personal robot will have to wear shades.

🏈 Sports

My New York Giants finally fired head coach Brian Daboll on Monday after the team's 2-8 start. What John Mara should have done was also fire General Manager Joe Schoen who’s responsible for hiring Brian Daboll and the rest of the horrible Offensive Line. Only good hires seem to be Quarterback Jaxson Dart, who just went out with a concussion because he takes too many chances and gets hit too often, and Running Back Cam Skattebo, who went out with a dislocated ankle and fractured fibula.

Wake me up when John Mara fires GM Joe Schoen and hires someone who knows how to draft a football team!

Was this email forwarded to you? Did you not hate it?

Then consider subscribing to The Business Behind The News. The only newsletter that brings you the business behind the news, with a healthy dose of sarcasm - all delivered to your inbox once a week in an easily digestible 5-minute read.

The Business Behind The News is written, edited, and published by Chris Thompson.