As last year wound down, the Disney TV empire — counting broadcasters like ABC, streaming platforms Disney+ and Hulu along with cable channels like FX — managed to stave off YouTube in the race for viewing marketshare in the attention economy.
Disney’s brands saw about 11.2 percent of overall TV viewing in the United States, just ahead of YouTube’s 11.1 percent share, per Nielsen‘s Media Distributor Gauge for December. Having the most-viewed TV series of 2024, Bluey, which tallied 55.62 billion minutes watched last year, certainly helped. And, in fact, all five of the top five most-viewed series of 2024 — Grey’s Anatomy, Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers and NCIS among them — were all available to watch on a Disney platform.
YouTube, meanwhile, appears to be reaping the benefits by orienting its app as a viewing destination on TV sets instead of just as a second screen for videos. The Google-owned platform claimed 11.1 percent of TV use in Nielsen’s tracking frame, which runs from November 25 through December 29.
Just like the prior month, Paramount Global’s sprawling array of outlets, including CBS and Paramount+, took the bronze in this tally with about 9.2 percent of all TV use. Taylor Sheridan series Landman and CBS’ The Equalizer have appeared in the top five of Nielsen’s weekly streaming charts in December and CBS is home to its share of NFL games.
Netflix, which had two NFL games in December as well as the season premieres of tentpole shows like Squid Game and Virgin River, leaped over both NBCUniversal and Fox this month to post about 8.5 percent share of all TV viewing. (The streaming giant, of course, has a much larger global footprint than counted in this U.S.-only Nielsen Distributor Gauge, hence its blockbuster earnings results that saw it add 19 million subscribers in its latest quarter, to tally up about 302 million worldwide memberships.)
Meanwhile, Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max, HBO and Discovery brands landed at 6 percent of overall TV viewing in December while Amazon’s Prime Video saw an uptick from 3.7 percent in November to 4 percent in the last month of the year, with Chris Evans-Dwayne Johnson holiday movie Red One partly credited.
The Roku Channel also saw a notable rise from a 1.7 percent TV viewing share in November to 2 percent in December. Earlier this month, its parent company touted that Roku services reach about 90 million streaming households.