By Patrick Coffee
YouTube and its stable of creators appear to have won the battle for television viewers. The fight for big TV ad budgets is another story.
Google's goliath video platform took over as the most-watched video provider on U.S. TV sets early last year, according to Nielsen data. People watch YouTube on televisions an average of 182 million hours a day, more time than Disney accumulates across its ABC broadcast network, its cable portfolio including ESPN and its streaming services combined, according to Nielsen.
"YouTube is not just [user-generated content] and cat videos anymore," Netflix Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos, who knows TV disruption when he sees it, said in January. "They are TV."
Marketers are well aware. The creator-brand partnerships that YouTube showcases at the ad industry's annual upfront events sell out every year, said Tara Walpert Levy, the streaming giant's vice president of the Americas. For its upcoming ad in the Super Bowl, traditional television's biggest night of the year, the software company Salesforce has recruited MrBeast, the biggest star on YouTube.
The rapid shift in viewership toward YouTube, however, hasn't been matched by a commensurate movement in spending among many big brands, according to marketers, YouTube creators and others.
"The budgets that are allocated for YouTube, both from a media perspective and a creative and production perspective, are still lagging dramatically behind the budgets that are allocated to TV projects," said Frank Cooper III, chief marketing officer at Visa.
TV campaigns can still command production budgets at least four to five times higher than those of their YouTube counterparts, even those with similar audience sizes and big-name talent, according to Zach Blume, co-founder and president of Portal A, a creative firm known for producing YouTube content for brands like Target and Lenovo, as well as YouTube's own annual video series "Rewind" that ran from 2010 to 2019.
The disparity is a common point of frustration for not only creators and the talent agencies that represent them but also some marketing executives trying to convince their companies to do more with YouTube. Those executives worry that failing to stay close to audiences means missing opportunities or, worse, leaving openings for rivals.
YouTube's ad business is incredibly successful by any measure, beating analysts' estimates in the most recent quarter with $10.26 billion in revenue and 15% year-over-year growth. Google parent Alphabet will release new results on Wednesday.
But many advertisers on YouTube are small and midsize businesses, often with little or no history on TV, and many use Google's automated buying platform Performance Max.
Large advertisers on the other hand frequently treat YouTube as part of their digital marketing budget rather than their traditional TV budget, placing it in direct competition with platforms like TikTok and Instagram, said Jacob Davis, global head of performance at ad firm Crossmedia.
That kind of advertiser sees YouTube and TV as two different products, even if consumers increasingly watch them on the same screens, he said.
And YouTube doesn't look as good from some angles when marketers compare it against big digital players instead of TV. The average TikTok user spends 45 minutes a day scrolling through the main feed, compared with an average of 29 minutes a day spent by Instagram Reels users and 22 minutes by YouTube Shorts viewers, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
Big brands are increasingly striking deals with YouTube creators to benefit from their strong relationships with subscribers and reduce the perceived risk of appearing on low-quality content. That can be a double-edged sword for the company.
It's hard to know how much YouTube earns from setting up deals between marketers and creators, because the company doesn't break it out in financial results or count it toward reported YouTube ad revenue. But it doesn't get a cut of revenue directly from such partnerships unless it helps arrange them, and the deals can be more difficult and slower in general for marketers to execute.
The Kroger supermarket chain started its yearslong partnership with "Mythical Kitchen," a popular, twice-weekly YouTube cooking show, by reaching out to parent company Mythical, said Jacob Moncrief, the company's chief operating officer. The two have since worked with a talent agency as well as YouTube's BrandConnect program to continue making deals, he said.
The executions have evolved along the way from one-off integrations like using a Kroger turkey in a holiday episode into mid-show segments where host Josh Scherer promotes the brand.
"We're getting a lot more trust from brands to put the ball in our court, " said Scherer.
Partnerships with YouTube creators can ultimately be more valuable than those on "ephemeral," recommendation-driven platforms like TikTok because their viewers are much more loyal, said Andrew Graham, head of business development at Creative Artists Agency's creators group, whose clients include Mythical and "Feeding Starving Celebrities" host Quen Blackwell.
YouTube has released several products designed to help brands find appropriate creators, such as "Cultural Moments" sponsorships built around events like the Grammys and the Super Bowl.
It has also been working to show CMOs why that's worth the effort, said Sean Downey, president of the Americas and global partners at Google. "We've gone through a really long education process," Downey said.
Visa rarely negotiates such deals with YouTube itself, according to Cooper, the payments firm executive. The company often works through talent firms and creator agencies, as it did last year when setting up a paid appearance by YouTube duo Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry, whose videos focus on the creator economy, on Visa's "Money Travels" video podcast.
One way YouTube could help marketers is by sharing more of its own data to help them develop a simpler way to understand and measure the results of their investments, as some other platforms have, Cooper added. YouTube "is evolving rapidly, and it's hard to put your arms around the entirety of it," he said.
YouTube last year introduced an application programming interface "to help brands better understand creators, their audiences and their campaigns," the company said. "This API enables brands and agencies to import creator data directly into their own platforms from creators who have opted in."
Marketers also still see YouTube as less heavily curated and therefore riskier in terms of content quality, especially outside the small group of YouTube creators who are popular enough to break through to the marketing community.
Visa's marketing leader is pushing to establish a greater understanding, throughout the company, of how YouTube may intersect with its investments across sports, gaming, music and live TV.
"We may not crack the code completely in 2026," Cooper said. "But I think we can make a lot of progress, and my personal mission is to make that progress this year."
Write to Patrick Coffee at patrick.coffee@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 04, 2026 06:00 ET (11:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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