Nielsen Crowns YouTube the Top TV Streamer. YouTube TV Still Counts as Cable.

Nielsen's Gauge gave YouTube a record 14.2% of all TV time in July. That number is "YouTube Main" only. Since February 2023, live channels watched through virtual pay-TV apps like YouTube TV, Sling and Hulu Live have been credited to broadcast and cable, not streaming.

So an ESPN game watched on YouTube TV adds to Disney's total, not Google's. Google pays Disney carriage fees, and then the minutes go to Disney too. The last time Nielsen broke that viewing out, in November 2022, it was 5.8% of all television. It hasn't been printed since.

Inside one YouTube TV hour it gets stranger. The network's national ads count as linear TV. The two minutes an hour the distributor fills by dynamic insertion count as CTV. Same couch, same remote, two different media.

None of this is wrong. It's a convention, and the convention is defensible. But conventions have beneficiaries, and when a chart says linear holds most of TV ad time, part of that lead arrived over the internet.