Neal Mohan, YouTube CEO, took the stage this week to announce that YouTube Shorts is now racking up an eye-watering 200 billion views every day. That’s not a typo. It’s nearly three times the 70 billion daily views Shorts was pulling just over a year ago in March 2024 — a 186% surge that puts YouTube’s short-form ambitions into hyperdrive.
Leaving TikTok dances in the dust
Portrait orientation in a landscape world
Let’s be clear: TikTok, once the undisputed king of vertical video, hasn’t published comparable daily metrics in some time — and for good reason. While ByteDance’s app remains wildly popular, the scale YouTube is operating at now is simply in another league.
But Mohan wasn’t done. He also shared that users are watching over 1 billion hours of YouTube on their TVs every single day. That’s a staggering figure that reflects a major behavioral shift — one that’s being captured in hard data. According to Nielsen’s latest Gauge report, YouTube claimed a record 12.5% share of all US TV viewership in May, beating out every other streamer and traditional broadcaster for the fourth month in a row.
“For more than half of the top 100 most-watched YouTube channels in the world, TV is their most-watched screen,” Mohan added — further proof that YouTube isn’t just dominating mobile and desktop, it’s staking serious ground in the living room, too.
Riding this momentum, Mohan teased the rollout of Veo 3 — DeepMind’s next-gen video generation model — coming to Shorts later this summer. The upgrade to YouTube’s AI-powered Dream Screen promises sharper visuals, smoother animation, and even audio integration for creators looking to add extra flair to their 60-second masterpieces.
Zooming out, the broader streaming landscape is undergoing its own upheaval. For the first time ever, streaming has overtaken cable and broadcast combined, accounting for 44.8% of all TV usage in May — up a whopping 71% over the past four years. Meanwhile, cable and broadcast have plummeted to 24.1% and 20.1%, respectively, over that same stretch.
Nielsen CEO Karthik Rao summed it up: “It’s fitting that this inflection point coincides with the four-year anniversary of The Gauge.” And YouTube? It’s not just leading the pack — it’s redefining what “TV” even means in 2025.
