How YouTube Became the Biggest Media Company in History

"One billion" people watching podcasts each month on YouTube is the latest in YouTube's "one billion" messaging strategy

Welcome back to Halftime, Posting Nexus’ weekly links round up and mini-essay. Today, important stories from Patreon, John Ganz, Ed Zitron and a recommendation for a book that pairs nicely with any A Complete Unknown watches you may have ahead of the Oscars on Sunday.

But first…

 Data!

1. State of Create — (Patreon)

2. There is No AI Revolution — (Where’s Your Ed At?)

Three Important Arguments 

1. Attention —  A slop publisher sold a ripoff of my book on Amazon — (404 Media)

2. Identity — Enough! — (John Ganz)

3. Platform — Why Don’t Legacy Publishers Monetize Their Social Media Accounts? — (Simon Owens)

Seven Must Reads of the Week 

1. Judge Allows Michal Crichton Estate to Pursue Lawsuit over The Pitt — (Variety)

2. Pokémon Go Maker Niantic Nears $3.5 Billion Deal to Sell Games Unit — (Bloomberg)

3. Adobe’s new PhotoShop app for the iPhone is more like the real thing — (The Verge) 

4. A two-year old YouTube Shorts video from MrBeast is now the most liked video with 54 million thumbs up — (Tubefilter)

5. He Left CNN to Start a Newsletter. It’s Now a Must Read — (Wall Street Journal)

6. Dow Jones Expands AI Marketplace to Nearly 5,000 Publishers — (Axios)

7. The Anonymous YouTubers Street Racing Through New York — (Wired)

Three Fun Stories

1. Funny One — A24 is making a Barney movie with The Bear’s Ayo Ediberi attached to write and star — (A24)

2. Wild One — The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians — (Wired)

3. Endearing One — The Death of Capital Letters: Why Gen Z Loves Lowercase — (The Guardian)

A Movie, a TV show, a Podcast, and a Book 

1. Movie — Emilia Perez (don’t waste your time with this one – even if you’re a Best Picture nominees completionist)

2. TV show — Zero Day (Netflix) 

3. Podcast — “A Theory of Media that Explains 15 Years of Politics” — The Ezra Klein Show  

4. Book — The Freaks Came Out to Write — Tricia Romano 

How YouTube Became the Biggest Media Company in History 

If you’ve paid attention to everything from Google’s earnings calls to the endless discourse permeating social media and legacy publications, podcasts on YouTube are huge. They’re so big, in fact, that YouTube is doubling down on this moment, announcing earlier this week that more than one billion people visit YouTube each month for podcasts. Podcast watchers and listeners streamed more than 400 million hours of content on TV sets in 2024 — a development that comes after YouTube increased its investment in the “podcast experience,” according to the company.

Spotify wants people to know they’re hard at work thinking about making it easier for podcasters to upload videos to the most dominant audio only app in the world; YouTube wants people to remember that absolutely nothing and certainly no one can touch the scale and attention YouTube seamlessly receives.

But why announce the number now? It’s a question I keep coming back to with each new onslaught of podcasting news from YouTube and Google. YouTube has existed as a dominant podcasting hub for years! Back in 2019, while I was a reporter covering the creator economy for The Verge, I wrote about the explosion of personalities turning to podcasts, and turning to YouTube specifically, because of the audience opportunity and advertising potential. More bluntly speaking, since many podcasters on YouTube were themselves YouTubers first and foremost, they were already recording themselves on video — this newer opportunity to connect with fans and juice any potential membership plans was a relatively low-cost, high reward new business lane.  

Trying to decipher the timing of YouTube’s new messaging is an even more fun challenge when you consider how YouTube’s teams have approached this in the past. YouTube has a history of announcing itself as something far long after it became that thing. All this podcasting state of play business brought me back to 2017. I was at Polygon, where I kickstarted the publication’s creator coverage.

Then C.E.O., Susan Wojcicki, was attending Kara Swisher’s annual Code Con when Wojcicki made a quick remark that made me whip my head. YouTube Red was a music service. It existed to provide an ad-free music experience for subscribers. Sure, that’s what YouTube Red ended up being for people but at the time YouTube Red wasn’t about music. It was about original TV shows. It was about Cobra Kai! YouTube Red was supposed to prove to advertisers and Hollywood creatives that films and TV shows of Hollywood caliber could be made with creators and distributed on YouTube. Lest we forget: YouTube Music also already existed. 

YouTube’s “One Billion” Obsession

What happened? Data, as always, gives us some clues to build out our hypothesis. Between 2014 and 2020, the number of Americans 12-years-old and older who spent time with YouTube as an audio-only platform once a week increased from 33% to 50%, according to Edison Research. By 2017, video made up the majority of all time spent with streaming music, according to a report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. That helped make YouTube responsible for 46% of all time spent with streaming on-demand music, outpacing Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, and others. By 2019, more than one billion people were coming to YouTube each month to listen to music, according to the company. 

Data also helps to tell an important YouTube development story when it comes to the “living room.” We don’t need to go that far back to see YouTube’s growth on TVs (as opposed to desktop and mobile), or to see similar narratives start to emerge from YouTube and Google’s teams. YouTube jumped from maintaining 6% of all time spent with streaming in the US as of May 2021 to 10.8% of all time as of January 2025. By the end of October 2024, long-form videos on YouTube made up nearly 75% of all viewing, according to Digital i research. This is an increase from the 65% Digital i reported in October 2023. The average YouTube video watched by US viewers was roughly 30 minutes in length. 

Unsurprising! When YouTube traded out “views” for “watch time” in 2012, and instituted a similar algorithmic change in 2016 that prioritized longer videos, it conditioned daily YouTube audiences to watch for longer periods of time. Crafting a reference for extended video runtimes helped YouTube surpass more than one billion hours of watch time on TV sets as of January, according to C.E.O. Neal Mohan. 

All those “one billion” figures keep popping up. We heard it originally for how many visitors were coming to YouTube for music. And then again for the number of people watching YouTube on TV. Therefore, it should surprise anyone that it’s the same figure that YouTube disclosed for its podcast business. All this data and proactive narrative storytelling tells us what we can expect to see out of YouTube with podcasts going forward. 

YouTube Premium “originals” now include superstar musicians to cater to more fans and refocus the idea of YouTube as a global music destination; YouTube TV owns Sunday Ticket to make Google’s vMVPD business the go-to app on Sundays. Although I don’t know what exactly the next step is for podcasts on YouTube (I would put some money on a genAI editing tool that helps YouTube’s B2C business and Google’s B2B business) all precedent suggests that by publicly acknowledging milestones and pointing to ongoing business investments, YouTube is announcing its investment in something that was already building in the background will likely increase tenfold. 

Go Long

There are three fundamental reasons that YouTube became the dominant streaming platform in living rooms and one of the most used audio platforms, in my opinion: 

1. Increases in trends that favored long session engagement and habit building, like lofi music streams for studying or video game livestreams, shifted YouTube into a background social engagement for Gen Z and younger Millennials

2. Independent or individual creators now trying to make longer videos to feed the algorithmic changes started finding ways to get two bites out of the same apple on content, like video podcasts, to prevent burnout while still producing videos, as seen by the earliest creators-turned-podcasters on the platform 

3. More polished videos that ran for an average of 30 minutes cut into time spent with traditional entertainment, thinning the value line between premium content and user generated fare

What YouTube accomplished was making the transition from talk radio (commuting) or daytime talk shows (ambient noise) into primetime entertainment much easier because it’s all within one app. Students throw on a lofi stream while they do their homework, listen to and watch Impaulsive or Views on their way home, and then throw on a new MrBeast video or an informational recap of a subject they’re learning in school, perusing the comments for interesting points.

YouTube is an unprecedented media company because it has managed to coalesce all these different entertainment needs at a rapturous pace that straddles both the need for mainstream connection (a new MrBeast spectacle or Lady Gaga video) and niche community building (anime, academia, books). 

What this ends up doing is turning YouTube from a destination into permanence; makes YouTube a reflex instead of a choice. And everyone helped YouTube get there. NBC News live streams all day on YouTube for free; music videos are thrown on YouTube without pause; full episodes of TV shows are made available to billions of people. All done in the name of marketing. YouTube’s ability to bring attention to other forms of entertainment is incredibly strong — but is it as powerful as the ability to take all this content it’s ingesting and turn the platform into a never ending stream of consciousness? That’s the billion dollar question. 

Here’s how that looks when thinking about what drives audience engagement, on average, during the day. People start their day with exercise, commuting, or listening to podcasts in the shower. Then it might drop during the morning because of meetings, class, etc. Picks up again during lunch as people have time to go on walks or show friends new songs. Dips in the afternoon and then once again picks up on the commute home, in the gym, or cooking dinner. I imagine television usage would follow a similar pattern for similar behavioral reasons, although it would likely have stronger peaks and valleys than music streaming platforms because Spotify also caters to ambience.

YouTube, however, may maintain a straighter line of consistency because it manages to fill in the space between mobile-heavy moments (commuting, exercising, cooking) and TV heavy moments (settling in for the night) while also providing easy, ongoing, and long periods of content in-between. Lofi streams that never end or gaming streams that feel like you’re hanging out with someone. Add in that YouTube doesn’t make people seek out content, but surfaces what they may be interested in based on the time of day, and you’ve got a perfect marriage of content and user experience. 

Not only does YouTube meet demand, but it creates new cultures that drive new supply, turning YouTube from part of the machine into the machine. People are spending more time than ever listening to music, with fans consuming about 21 hours per week in 2023, which is up from 20 hours per week in 2022, according to the phonographic institute. Nearly 75% of people listen to music via streaming services, including YouTube.

Most notably, however, the split in music consumption between audio and video is 1:1. The two charts below show a) an increase in Google Searches over the last 20 years for lofi streams and b) how to upload music to YouTube and Spotify. The first chart shows a continuous peak in demand for lofi streams, with the top related queries specifically about lofi streams on YouTube. As music trends shift, YouTube is the platform that people gravitate toward and create upon.

The second chart shows that while increases in searches for uploading to Spotify started to outpace YouTube in 2018/2019, YouTube remains a strong source of supply. I have argued with friends that Spotify’s new reported premium tier is allowing subscribers to “edit” songs because right now those edits are mainly sought out and poplar on YouTube.

Everything about YouTube’s functionality is designed to keep people playing longer to make YouTube permanent, not optional. Longer live streams for music that act as background fodder, hour-long podcasts that encourage on-screen viewing and off-screen listening, and bridging more premium mainstream content with hyper targeted niche videos all designed to appear at the right moment of the day. 

YouTube’s “one billion” narrative that has appeared with music, gaming, TV streaming, and now podcasting isn’t a declaration of new behavior happening on YouTube; it’s a reminder that whatever type of entertainment people seek out during the day, YouTube is undeniably the biggest. Podcasting is just YouTube’s latest moment to publicly acknowledge that truth; since YouTube is the largest, most centralized media environment in history, any type of media that’s going to draw people’s attention will play out, in the long term, more successfully on YouTube. 

Will YouTube Just Continue to Grow Forever? 

Earlier this week I touched on how the very same companies that built the creator economy were slowly destroying it by taking attention away from individual creators to instead focus on ensuring the supply of content was prioritized for each user, not necessarily the creator in question. Therefore, the question about whether YouTube will continue to grow and grow and grow is tied less to the power of YouTube, which is indisputable, but the potential arrogance.

All empires fall because their unrelenting desire to grow destroys the foundations they’ve set. It happened with Rome, it happened with the Mongols and, perhaps most relevant to this topic, it happened to the East India Trading Company. I love this passage from Ted Gioia on how Google is falling into the same traps as the East India Trading Company, especially because I think you can apply it to YouTube and its obvious desire to find the next “one billion people per month” metric:

“[Google] always invests in businesses that put them in the ‘trade routes’—controlling the linkages, and never getting involved in the creation of tangible value,” Gioia wrote. “That’s their philosophy at YouTube, for example. Other people do the creating—Google just swallows up cash as the intermediary.”

Right now, Google has the monopoly on online video because there is absolutely no real competitor to YouTube by both metrics of size and incentive for creators. If you want to get paid for making videos on the internet, and if you want to find an audience, your best bet is still YouTube even if it’s worse than it was for creators a decade ago. But recent decisions from the Department of Justice and ongoing complaints from the Federal Trade Commission suggest this could change. Remember, the company that gained the most from the DOJ’s decision on Microsoft’s software monopoly in 2000 was Google.

All that said: if the government were to do nothing, and there’s certainly some likelihood of that happening as C.E.O. Sundar Pichai cozies up to Trump, why wouldn’t YouTube continue to grow? Think about what that “one billion” figure represents. It’s not just the number of people, but it’s the access to data that YouTube and Google receive, train off of, and build around. So long as YouTube continues to collect more data than it knows what to do with, then it will continue to grow because executives understand how to invest in the macro trends (podcasts, music, TV experiences) while hyper targeting at an individual level the exact type of content needed to get people to say “just one more.” 

One of the points that I’ve raised again and again in Posting Nexus as it pertains to YouTube’s monopoly status is that if genAI were to become a thing — and that’s a big if — YouTube will benefit from it almost immediately. Faster editing, “better” graphics (or access to faster, slightly better graphics), and more frequent outputs will drive the level of supply on YouTube to meet this persistent demand that hasn’t slowed down even with the number of videos increasing each year. Think about how genAI technology can theoretically help with podcasting or music production. Google is clearly investing heavily in this technology, and the amount of data that YouTube has plus the number of aspiring creators makes YouTube a blank canvas to practice. 

Since I don’t know what genAI will look like if it were to really take off in a meaningful way, I won’t give my hypothesis on what happens next. But I will end on this note: I wouldn’t be surprised if five years from now, the next “billion people” quote in a press release is about a genAI technology Google is currently in the earliest stages of developing, using, and releasing.