YouTube says people watched 35 billion hours of news in 2025.
YouTube says news drew more than 35 billion hours of viewing in 2025, a third of it on TVs, and has set out Studio, membership and likeness tools for newsrooms.
YouTube says people watched more than 35 billion hours of news content on the platform worldwide in 2025, and that more than 12 billion of those hours came from connected TVs.
The figures are in a post by Brandon Feldman, its director of news and civics partnerships, published on 1 October 2026 after the company’s 14th News Working Group in New York City, which it says brought together more than 100 global news partners.
The post also sets out what YouTube told those partners about three things: tools in YouTube Studio, Channel Memberships and protection against AI impersonation. It gives no dates for any of them. The wording is “rolling out”, “upcoming” and “soon”.
Studio tools for editorial teams
YouTube describes a set of Studio features aimed at teams making packaging decisions on deadline:
- Enhanced Insights and Research destinations, for judging how coverage performed and spotting emerging topics.
- Feedback on a draft’s narrative flow, pacing and storytelling structure.
- Dynamic thumbnails, which automatically serve the highest-performing thumbnail to different audience segments.
- An upcoming video A/B testing tool for hooks, storytelling formats and visuals.
- Ask Studio reviewing past coverage and suggesting refreshed thumbnails.
Memberships and likeness
YouTube says Channel Memberships have driven more than $1.5 billion in payouts to creators over the last five years. It is adding a dedicated in-app hub for members’ exclusive content, video previews so a viewer can watch a snippet before joining, and members-only communities.
On impersonation, the post says journalists can already control their visual likeness through the Likeness Detection tool. YouTube says it will soon start combining speaking voice detection with facial detection to improve match accuracy, and will make Likeness Detection available in the YouTube mobile app.
The post does not say which countries or channel sizes get each feature first, or whether any of them is limited to news channels. It does not explain how the watch-time figures were counted.
What it means for publishers
The television figure is the one to take into the next planning meeting. On YouTube’s own numbers, roughly a third of news viewing last year happened on a TV screen, which is a different viewing session from a phone and a reason to look at how long your videos run and how they open.
The membership changes matter to any newsroom treating YouTube as a revenue line. A preview before joining gives a non-member something to judge the offer on, so the exclusive content needs to earn the click.
This week, open YouTube Studio and note which of these features your channel already has. Then check whether your on-screen reporters have set up Likeness Detection, which the post says is available to journalists now.
Sources
The NBK Social briefing
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