YouTube’s victory in the TV wars depends on parents

By Jason Bailey

Here’s a stat that might come as a shock to casual observers of the media ecosystem: The media company that commands the largest percentage of our eyeballs is not the mighty Netflix Inc., the Walt Disney Co. juggernaut or the omnipresent Amazon.com Inc. Prime. It’s YouTube. The platform represents 12.4% of audiences’ time spent watching television, according to Nielsen Holding Ltd.’s Media Distributor Gauge report for April. That beats Disney’s 10.7% (which includes not only the platforms and channels that bear its name but ESPN and Hulu to boot), nearly doubles the 6.8% and 6.7% for Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery, respectively, and pummels the puny 3.5% share for Amazon.

But before we hail the platform as another nail in traditional TV’s coffin, it needs to accomplish something else: earn the trust of its users, particularly parents.

There are real problems with the way YouTube works and the suggestions it makes to viewers (especially younger ones). It sets the entertainment powerhouse up for the kind of backlash we’re seeing against other dominant but problematic tech companies.

Credit: Bloomberg 

If you’re old enough to remember a pre-YouTube world or when the platform struggled through its initial era of low-res user-generated videos and one-joke viral breakouts, the idea of consuming media primarily through that portal sounds absurd.

For example, Gen Xers like me may use it as little more than a last resort destination: a place to find a clip from a movie that isn’t streaming, an episode of a show that we forgot to DVR, the badly-dated music video for a song that was briefly popular when we were in high school or various other goofy little things that aren’t substantial enough to exist anywhere else.

But I can also tell you, as the father of a tween, that this is not how younger people think of YouTube. For many of them, it (and other social media sites) is the window through which they see the world and the door though which they travel to find whatever they’re seeking. The beauty of YouTube circa 2025 is that it has everything, from rentable movies to full, free seasons of television to vast musical archives to daily updates from your favorite influencers.

The horror of YouTube circa 2025 is also that it has everything, from unhinged conspiracy theories to casual racism and misogyny to hours-long videos of ideological indoctrination to sexually suggestive material. Its everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach might not be such a concern if the platform increased efforts (aside from the most basic and easily evadable parental controls) in keeping the scarier stuff contained.

Instead, viewers are in the thrall of the platform’s problematic algorithm, which exists not to enhance the quality of the user experience but the quantity of it. In December, the company reported that people watched more than one billion hours of YouTube on TV daily. That time can often be spent not on the specific video that a user is seeking out but on the videos the platform’s algorithm recommends and/or auto-plays at its conclusion.

By now, there are well-known stories of how quickly the algorithm can steer viewers toward unrelated, or even worrisome, content. A much-shared 2019 New York Times story detailed the online radicalization of Caleb Cain, who “fell down the alt-right rabbit hole” on YouTube. A year earlier, the company’s then-product chief and now CEO said that the site’s recommendations accounted for more than 70% of all time spent on YouTube. (Alphabet Inc.’s Google, YouTube’s parent company, did not share updated metrics when asked by Bloomberg Opinion ahead of publication.)

And while it may be uncommon for the platform to function as a full-stop radicalization machine — suggesting QAnon screeds to innocent cat video connoisseurs — it’s hard to find a user (or a parent) who can’t recall at least one head-scratching recommendation or ill-advised curiosity click.

Busy parents or guardians, for example, might turn on an age-appropriate show for their kids to watch on YouTube (there’s a reason 28% of the platform’s viewers are aged 2-17). Maybe they need to occupy their children’s attention while working from home, doing a household chore or two or perhaps just to get a mental break — only to hear or see a questionable video playing before it can be intercepted.

Does that scenario sound familiar? For at least a segment of the population, this has led to an inherent distrust of YouTube’s anything-goes, Wild West approach, which is absent from the sense of curation on conventional television networks or subscription streaming services.

And it’s hard to overstate the role that the platform’s unruly and frequently unmoderated comments section can play in the dissemination of misinformation, to say nothing of the targeted harassment that runs rampant on both the site itself and various third-party tools.

Unfortunately, the monopolistic nature of our current tech landscape means that the chances of an upstart video streaming platform replacing the ubiquitous YouTube are slim to none, even if other sites and apps (such as Vimeo, to name the most obvious example) offer a far superior user experience.

But never forget, it was once hard to imagine any social media website overtaking MySpace, and user enthusiasm for Google’s search engine, has cooled of late. The combination of copious ads and insipid, unwanted and frequently inaccurate AI-powered results have sullied the latter brand, at least among users who are paying attention. Some people have begun to seek out alternate web searches, just as many fled the Elon Musk iteration of Twitter.

Is a similar migration for more ethical online video platforms in the realm of possibility? YouTube should make its algorithm safer for its youngest demographic to avoid finding out.