Why you can't ignore YouTube advertising in 2026

Here’s a mad stat: in mid-2026, YouTube is the second most-watched video service in Britain. Not second among the streamers. Nope. Second overall, behind the BBC. It lapped ITV in 2024 (condolences to the Corrie fans).

We’ve been banging the drum for the ‘Tube since ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ was its biggest cultural fingerprint, but even now, as it ousts the home of Love Island from the runner-up spot, so many brands we speak to treat it as the weird triplet to TikTok and Instagram. The Kevin Jonas, if you will.

Then I say to them: where’d you last watch a celeb interview? A news update? A guide on how to fix the weird sound the fridge is making? High chances they say YouTube. Even the folks who say The Graham Norton Show watched it as a clip on YouTube, not live on the telly.

So you can’t leave the big red play button on the table anymore. If you need a bit more convincing (and a leg-up in getting started), read on.

Who’s watching YouTube? Everyone. Who else? Everyone’s mums.

Going by the ‘Online Nation’ report Ofcom dropped in December 2025, round about 94% of UK adult internet users are on YouTube, averaging 51 minutes a day, up from 47 the year before. It sometimes gets bandied about that YouTube primarily draws younger eyes, but the numbers show it’s for all of us. It’s OurTube.

Globally, YouTube’s revenue passed $60 billion across ads and subscriptions in 2025, which makes it bigger than Netflix (stranger things have happened).

And UK video ad spend hit £9.3 billion in ’25, up 20%, now nearly a quarter of all digital spend, according to IAB UK’s figures published in March.

That’s a lot of eyeballs, and, more importantly, it’s eyeballs that watch videos — short-form and long-form — on their TVs more than they do their phones.

I think there’s only two places where I’ve ever seen TikToks playing on a TV: in a bar, and in my dentist’s office. TikTok is firmly a small rectangle thing. YouTube’s got the reins when it comes to big rectangles.

Ofcom found viewing among over-55s nearly doubled in a year, from six minutes a day to eleven, and 42% of all over-55 YouTube viewing now happens on a TV rather than a phone.

According to Barb (the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, not your mate Barbara), in the second quarter of 2025, TVs made up about 43% of in-home YouTube viewing among adults, ahead of smartphones at 32%.

So the heftiest chunk of YouTube binging in Britain is still happening on the settee, via big rectangles. Typically with more than one person watching.

Reaching the little- and large-screen crowds is so vital, we’ve shaped our production techniques around it. Shots framed for vertical and landscape crops. Edits condensed or stretched to different behaviours (quick-scrolling or watching-during-dinner). Gotta meet audiences where they are with the kinda content and ad targeting that works for each platform.

At a time when the quality of search engine results is at risk of being dragged down by AI-generated articles and pages, what’s a format that’s harder to successfully prompt into existence? Video! Who owns the largest video platform ever? Google! So naturally, YouTube has become a huge deal for SEO — especially AI search.

The think tank Pew Research tracked nearly 69,000 Google searches and found that the sources cited most often in AI summaries are Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit. Those three account for around 15% of every link an AI Overview shows.

SEO platform BrightEdge, looking at 30 million-ish sources, put YouTube’s share of citations in Google’s AI Overviews at 29.5%, and reckons it gets cited something like 200 times more often than the next video platform.

And as we mentioned in our guide on appearing in AI search results, that’s a bigger deal than ever: zero-click SEO (building brand trust with someone who sees you repeatedly in AI search citations, even if they don’t click through to your website ’til the 100th time you grace their screen) is a huge priority right now.

Pew found only 8% of searches with an AI Overview produced a click on any result, against 15% without one. But the majority of the rapidly-shrinking pool of click-throughs skews towards the YouTube thumbnails that appear in these summaries.

If you create good-quality YouTube videos meeting the search demands of your customers, and they see your brand logo or gorgeous smile beaming out from their search results 10–20 times, they’ll eventually be like, wow, this is the real deal, let me actually click through to the video and then throw money at this company.

I’ve encountered a few brands whose marketing teams, largely due to their unfamiliarity with the platform, have a sort of notion that it costs more to advertise on YouTube than it does, say, TikTok or Instagram. Totally not the case. Sometimes the price tag’s higher. Sometimes lower. Completely campaign- and circumstance-dependent.

Ah, but what about the cost of a film crew, or even the expense of re-editing existing videos for YouTube?

We do tend to recommend getting into the landscape and/or long-form stuff eventually, especially if you wanna tick the boxes for AI search, but it’s not an absolute must for getting started with YouTube.

If you’ve been making vertical vids for TikTok or Reels, you’ve already produced most of what you need for a YouTube campaign without realising.

Same aspect ratio, same length, same three-second window to hook and hold them lest their thumb banish you to the netherworld. Shorts (YouTube’s answer to TikTok/Reels, not the comfy above-the-knee legwear) will welcome your existing vertical assets with open arms.

The buying’s got easier, too. Demand Gen, Video Reach, and Video View campaigns all get you into Shorts. YouTube Select Shorts (a system where you agree a price up front and Google guarantees a set number of views against its most popular content) recently opened up to everyone rather than just the big spenders.

And Google added placement-level reporting not too long ago, so you can actually see how your Shorts perform against the ads that play before regular YouTube videos, instead of guessing based off one blended number.

There’s a lot of pie to claim in Shorts, too, by the way: over 200 billion views per day, just on Shorts, by Google’s figures.

None of this means you can skip making something good, but if your Reel/TikTok content is already solid, you’re at least not starting on the first rung of the ladder. Repurpose what you’ve got, see what holds attention, then invest in the long-form that earns you those AI citations, subscribers, and conversions.

Someone watches a video. They see your ad, but don’t click. Then they book a table a few weeks later by Googling your restaurant. Analytics files that under ‘brand search’ or ‘direct’. YouTube gets none of the credit, the performance looks weak, and budgets get cut.

That’s where agencies with trusty workarounds come in.

Many tests — our own included — have found that YouTube drove around triple the incremental sales than the platform’s own reporting showed.

Analytic Partners, who build marketing mix models, explained it well: video’s effect lasts about twice as long as non-video media, and a decent slice of what advertising does is a halo that lifts everything else. It’s the kind of scenario that last-click attribution struggles to account for.

The practical answer is unglamorous (but quite interesting, if you know what you’re looking at): geo tests, holdout regions, marketing mix modelling for the bigger picture, and conversion-level tracking that captures source at the point someone actually buys or books.

So it can be a tad more fiddly to draw straight lines between the ads you’re running and the wins you’re scoring, but we speak from experience when we say: when you’ve figured out how to accurately discern the results, YouTube’s strengths as an ad platform are hard to refute.

Before you do anything else, work out which screen matters. If your customers skew older and your goal is awareness across a region, YouTube’s where it’s at. If you’re, for example, a restaurant chasing younger diners, and you already make vertical content for TikTok, Shorts costs you almost nothing extra and you should be running it yesterday.

Then I’d build your methods of measurement before launching into the campaign, because retrofitting is hard to pull off with a pretty bow.

And I’d stop judging it on clicks. YouTube is not a click channel. It’s the thing that makes the click cheaper somewhere else, and if your reporting can’t see that, then, hey, we know a pretty good agency with a circus-inspired name who can get your attribution models sorted out.

We run YouTube and Demand Gen campaigns as part of our paid media work, and we produce the video, too, which means the creative gets built for how it’ll be served.

See you on the big rectangle.