NEW YORK—YouTube continues to mark its 20th anniversary with more TV viewing data showing its increasingly powerful place in the TV ecosystem.
In Nielsen’s April 2025 Media Distributor Gauge report, which ranks the largest M&E companies by their share of TV viewing, YouTube maintained its lead among media companies with a 12.4% share of audiences’ time spent watching television.
The April ranking marked YouTube’s third consecutive month atop the ranking and its largest share of TV viewing to date.
Nielsen also reported that April was the first time that company rankings in the Media Distributor Gauge have stayed exactly the same month over month since Nielsen began tracking this data in November 2023.
The Walt Disney Co. held the second-largest share of TV viewing in both April and March, and this month represented 10.7% of total television. Disney’s 0.2 point gain in share over March was partly driven by cross-network coverage of the NFL draft on ESPN and ABC, the NCAA women’s basketball tournament and the first round of the NBA playoffs. Disney also owned April’s top streaming title, “Grey’s Anatomy,” which notched 3.9 billion viewing minutes and benefited from its multichannel and multiplatform availability, Nielsen said.
Paramount comprised 8.9% of total TV watch-time in April and exhibited the largest monthly share increase among media companies (up 0.4 share points, which, based on unrounded figures, was slightly larger than YouTube’s increase). Viewership gains to its CBS broadcast affiliates drove more than half of Paramount’s monthly growth.
NBCUniversal rounded out the top four media distributors in April with an 8.2% share of TV, up from 8.0% in March.
Netflix stayed in the fifth spot with 7.5% share of viewing, down from the 7.9% share it had in March.
Warner Bros. Discovery maintained 6.7% of TV usage this month, boosted by a 58% lift in viewership to TNT, which televised 18 first-round NBA playoff games through April 27). WBD was also buoyed by HBO series “The White Lotus,” which was the second most watched streaming title in April with 3.7 billion viewing minutes on Max. The White Lotus was also No. 1 in Nielsen’s Streaming Top 10 during the weeks of March 21-April 6 and April 4-13, totaling 1.31 billion minutes and 1.25 billion minutes, respectively, Nielsen said
The April 2025 interval ran from March 31 through April 28. Nielsen reporting follows the broadcast calendar with measurement weeks that run Monday through Sunday.
