YouTube last week officially ousted the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster ITV as the video platform now second only to the BBC in audience size, according to the tech and media regulator Ofcom. 

YouTube’s ad take is pumping everywhere – it raked $9.8bn in the June quarter, according to its latest earnings results – up 13% year-on-year. 

YouTube has been increasingly vocal on its ambition to target legacy broadcasters for bigger brand budgets and recast TV as swerving rapidly to the creator economy. 

Last week UK broadcasters lobbed a counterstrike, attempting to demonstrate that advertisers needed clearer, comparable reporting of YouTube  with TV audiences if it wants to take TV’s revenues. To date, YouTube has vigorously resisted joining any audience measurement system around the world if not on its terms and definitions - that position has not hurt its growth trajectory as advertisers large and small buy YouTube’s market narrative of being different. 

If there was any doubt YouTube sees itself as reframing TV to its likeness – broadcasters and global streamers are equally old-world in its eyes – the user generated content  platform last week pulled its involvement with the UK TV and streaming body BARB Audiences. To many observers, the timing was not random. Last week also saw BARB and its audience measurement partner Kantar release a world-first initiative reporting YouTube’s audiences at a channel level on connected TVs in the same way for broadcasters and streamers. The first week’s numbers from BARB and Kantar, showed YouTube’s top 200 channels dominated by content for kids aged under 5 like Peppa Pig, and lots of music. YouTube’s audience reach numbers by channel, central to how TV and streaming services win advertising contracts – were tiny. 

But does any of this matter? Do brands and advertisers care? The Future of TV Forum’s Justin Lebbon and global CEO of market mix modelling firm Mutinex, Henry Innis, duke out YouTube’s revenue romp, its surging adloads and a likely hurricane for traditional media-funded audience reporting – Innis argues business outcome-based audience measurement is set to shake-up decades of norms.