New data suggests that people's streaming habits are pretty diverse, but there is one platform in particular that everyone is gravitating to.
Funny enough, it does not spend billions on content. It rarely utilizes celebrities, and I'd even say that the platform is at its absolute height when it steers clear of them.
The top streaming service is, in fact, you.
YouTube to be more specific.
According to SambaTV, YouTube leads every other streaming service, and it has a healthy lead over the others. It gets over 13 percent of the share of TV time, with Disney+ coming in at number two at 9.7 percent and Netflix in third at 8.7 percent.
Even more interesting is that YouTube garners that level of attention for only $1 billion. Compare that to every other network that has to spend more for far less viewing time.
Apple spends $20B for every 1% of TV time.
— Samba TV (@samba_tv) May 13, 2026
YouTube does it for $1B.
Content volume isn't the same as attention. The gap between spend and share tells the real story.#AttentionEconomy #TVData #Streaming #MediaStrategy #Samba pic.twitter.com/CZJZbCIlF0
While YouTube does offer rentals and purchases for movies and television shows like Amazon Prime, these titles don't exactly fly off the shelves. What's bringing all the boys to the yard is content created by normal, everyday people like you.
Anyone half-talented with editing software can create their own videos and post them to the website. Content such as YouTube shorts can be made easily with little more than a phone and a wi-fi connection. The result is millions of videos uploaded every day from people who've never gone to film school. In fact, some of the best content creators are those who've never drifted remotely close to a professional studio in their lives.
But what's really interesting about this is that YouTube isn't just a place for generic user-generated videos. A lot of what people flock to is analytical, political, and general newsy content. This includes both sides of the aisle, with a very strong presence of right-leaning mindsets.
This is on top of the incredibly creative things you see being put on the platform that are more entertainment-based.
And this should be a very clear tell about the society we live in today. Our entertainment and news are dominated by one kind of ideological perspective on the professional level. The problem is so out of control that Hollywood has become sort of a one-trick pony, only spitting out the occasional hit.
Our news media is even worse in that regard. Bias is so accepted by the legacy media that anything that approaches honest reporting about Republicans or President Donald Trump is automatically considered somehow inappropriate.
It's all incredibly limiting, and that is undeniably boring. At some point, you're going to want to tune into something less frustrating and creative, and that's where the people come in. Platforms like YouTube and Rumble offer something that the legacy studios and news outlets don't, and that's variety, and I don't just mean ideological. I mean, it's here you can see styling choices taken that studios wouldn't touch.
Since only a handful are tied to professional studios, people are free to take risks and trial and error their way through their content. What you get on the other side of that is original ideas and fresh takes on various genres.
Read: What Analog Horror Tells Us About the Future of Entertainment
It shows that people are starved for originality and that we've been so soaked in the legacy media's leftist bias for so long that we've just started relying on each other for the news and entertainment we need. People are far more likely to trust voices that feel like they come from a ground level, rather than an elitist level, especially nowadays.
I've been saying for some time that Hollywood's decline would likely come from citizen creators, especially with AI becoming more and more useful for creating pictures and videos. I fully expect to see that gap between YouTube and other platforms widen as time goes on, and to be honest. I'm not upset about it.
