Image Credit: Thibault Penin

At the 2021 IAB NewFronts annual event for advertisers, YouTube positioned themselves as the replacement for traditional television networks.

At this year’s NewFronts showcase, YouTube boasted about their TV screen reach, promoting themselves to advertiser of traditional networks as a real competitor for linear TV.

At this point, even those of you who negotiated good rates are paying more for less every year. This is a moment. An inflection point to reset, reassess. If you were to start from zero and build based on where people are watching, you would start with streaming.

Allan C. Thygesen, President of Americas, Google

The Google owned online video streaming platform says that more than one billion hours of content on YouTube is consumed on televisions each day. That’s up from 450 million in June 2020 and 250 million in 2019. This number isn’t the only one they gave, stating that more than 120 million people watched YouTube on TV in December 2020 alone. Comscore says that YouTube is the number 1 in reach and watch time among ad-supported streaming services. YouTube represents 40% of watch time of all ad-supported streaming services analyzed. In September 2020, YouTube reached more TV viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 than all linear networks combined.

YouTube also highlighted upcoming ad products that allow brands to specifically target TV viewers. One such product is an interactive feature called Brand extensions. The upcoming feature rolling out globally later this year gives viewers the option to send information about an ad on TV to their phone, with one click. This makes it easier for consumers to find out more about the product and brands to gain key metrics. “Brands will be able to measure conversions generated by brand extensions, directly in Google Ads.”

Video Credit: YouTube