YouTube has been here long enough to feel “established”, which is exactly why it gets misread. It’s treated as a legacy platform when it’s actually a live cultural engine, a creator-first entertainment network, and increasingly a television channel people actively choose.
That mismatch is costing brands. Not in theory, in measurable attention, effectiveness, and creative relevance.
If there’s one shift brands should internalise, it’s that YouTube isn’t competing with social platforms anymore. It’s competing with broadcast, cable, and streaming as a default viewing habit.
Nielsen’s Gauge has repeatedly put YouTube at the top of U.S. streaming usage, and Nielsen has also highlighted YouTube’s growing share of total TV viewing time.
That matters because it reframes the brief. You’re not planning “some YouTube content”. You’re planning for a screen that sits in the living room, that holds long attention, and that increasingly behaves like prime time.
The platform is massive, but the interesting part is how diversified it’s become. YouTube’s ad revenue hit roughly $8.9B in Q1 2025 alone. Shorts sits at around 1.5B users and averages about 70B daily views, according to Fast Company. Podcast consumption on YouTube is now over 1B monthly active viewers, with YouTube stating it’s the most frequently used service for podcasts in the U.S. And then there’s the CTV acceleration: analysis based on Tinuiti-managed spend showed 43% of YouTube ad campaign spend going to TV screens in Q1 2025, up sharply year-on-year.
That’s not a niche behaviour. That’s a structural change in where YouTube is being consumed, and where performance is being driven.
The Kaizen moment is important because it’s not just “a creator did well”. It’s a blueprint for what YouTube becomes when brands and studios stop thinking in clips and start thinking in events.
Inoxtag’s Everest documentary became an event film in France, with reports of around 350,000 tickets sold in 24 hours across a large screening run, while the project also lived on YouTube as a premium long-form release.
It’s the clearest recent signal that YouTube isn’t only where content is distributed. It’s where modern entertainment can premiere, scale, and then travel.
Too many brands use YouTube as a dumping ground for 30-second TVCs. Which is wild, because YouTube is one of the few places where audiences will still give you long attention, if you earn it.
YouTube doesn’t reward interruption. It rewards programming.
This is the mindset shift. Think like a vod platform.
Plan content the way a broadcaster would : series, formats, recurring chapters… then make it culturally relevant with creators, community signals, and iteration speed.
Build for long-form storytelling.
Long-form is where trust gets built and where brand meaning can actually settle. Shorts can introduce you, but long-form is where belief forms.
Use Shorts for culture and commerce, not leftovers.
Shorts is not where you repurpose; it’s where you earn discovery. It’s a format with its own grammar, and it’s now one of the biggest attention surfaces on the internet.
Treat creators as the heartbeat, not the distribution layer.
YouTube has paid over $70B to creators, artists and media companies over the last three years through its ecosystem, which tells you exactly who powers the platform.
The best YouTube strategies aren’t “brand content plus a creator cameo”. They’re creator-native IPs entertainment with brand value designed into it.
YouTube is the world’s biggest stage for brands that are willing to think like entertainers and operate like networks.
If you’re still treating it as a place to park TV ads, you’re not just missing reach. You’re missing the chance to build modern brand equity in the one environment that can hold attention at scale—on mobile, on TV, and everywhere in between.
