YouTube now commands 15.8% of U.S. television screen time, double Netflix’s share and ahead of Disney, BeInCrypto reported.
This dominance doesn’t translate to a direct stock play. There is no YouTube ticker. To bet on its growth, investors must buy shares of its parent company, Alphabet.
According to recent Nielsen data, YouTube achieved a record 15.8% share of U.S. television time in August, surpassing Disney’s 9.3% and Netflix’s 7.7%. However, YouTube does not have its own publicly traded shares.
The platform is owned by Alphabet, meaning any investment in YouTube’s success is an investment in Alphabet, which also includes Google’s search engine and cloud services. Alphabet offers two classes of stock: GOOGL, which has voting rights, and GOOG, which does not.
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While YouTube’s viewership share is substantial, its revenue makes less than a tenth of Alphabet’s total quarterly earnings. The platform’s advertising revenue grew by 9% to $11.21 billion in the third quarter, according to Alphabet’s financial report. This figure was slightly below analyst expectations and accounted for less than one-tenth of Alphabet’s total quarterly revenue of $127.6 billion. Following the earnings report, Alphabet's stock price dropped and has not yet recovered.
Netflix is in the process of cutting around 1,000 jobs, following a drop in its stock value to a 26-month low after its latest quarterly results. Disney, the second-largest TV time provider, is reportedly considering thousands of layoffs as it faces increasing competition from the streaming sector.
Meanwhile, Alphabet’s heavy investment in artificial intelligence has led to a negative free cash flow in the last quarter, despite the company being considered one of the beneficiaries of the recent AI market sell-off.
Although some crypto platforms offer tokenized versions of Alphabet stock, such as xStocks with the ticker GOOGLx, these products are not available to U.S. investors. The SEC has also issued a new exception allowing companies to block tokenized trading of their shares, and 33 firms have already utilized this to prevent such trading. For now, the term “YouTube stock” remains a search query rather than a stock ticker.
