Why YouTube Is the New Primetime (Both Online and Off!)

Thought Leadership 2 Dec 2025

In this piece, Rebecca Coleman, North America CEO, looks back at 2025, exploring the one shift that was impossible to ignore: YouTube fundamentally taking ownership over where and how audiences find entertainment.

For an entire generation, YouTube is now the primary screen, the undisputed default evening destination, and the place where culture emerges first, often before the traditional gatekeepers even realize a conversation has begun.

This wasn’t the year YouTube “challenged” traditional TV. It was the year it absorbed it. Long-form storytelling, creator-led series, live sports, expert commentary, late-night comedy, and the endless scroll of Shorts all converged into a single, powerful ecosystem. The data confirms it: our Digital 2026 North America intelligence shows YouTube is now the #1 platform for total time spent per user, comfortably outpacing every social platform and significantly outperforming many streaming services.

Culture provided the clearest evidence. YouTube’s first-ever live NFL game streamed from São Paulo reached more than 17 million viewers, a primetime milestone hiding in plain sight. Creator-led talk shows consistently outperformed legacy late-night clips. Gen Z creators launched polished, episodic franchises rivaling premium streaming content. And during the year’s biggest cultural moments, creator commentary often shaped the public narrative faster, and more insightfully, than traditional broadcasts.

Over the past few years, We Are Social has been fortunate enough to be included in hundreds of Social Media RFPs. The vast majority of these include standard requests for strategy across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X/Twitter, and sometimes even Pinterest. Yet, YouTube is routinely overlooked as a core social and content strategy platform. Instead, YouTube is overwhelmingly relegated to being a component of a media/ad buy.

This gap is costing brands. YouTube is now a multi-format ecosystem that drives short-form reach, long-form engagement, community-building, and search dominance. It’s one of the few places where brands can build audiences who actively seek out entertainment, education, deep dives, and trusted information. Not just passive feed impressions.

For brands building or refreshing their YouTube strategy, a few high-impact starting points: 

• Shorts: Quick awareness, cultural participation, and top-of-funnel discovery.
• Product Deep Dives: Evergreen content that solves real user needs and drives long-term search visibility.
• Creator Integrations: True co-creation, not just sponsorship. 
• Podcasts: Lean-back viewing/listening with built-in discovery advantages.
• Storytelling: Brand world building and/or episodic content, driving more meaningful connections and returning audiences.

YouTube is no longer a secondary host for repurposed content. it is a central pillar of modern brand-building, culturally, strategically, and algorithmically. Brands that continue treating it as an afterthought will miss the opportunity to build deeper loyalty, dominate search categories, and meaningfully grow their business.

The time for a comprehensive, ecosystem-led YouTube strategy isn’t “coming.” It’s already here.