On October 20, 2026, the Video Advertising Bureau emailed marketers a two-page infographic, "Spot the Difference," which claims that 21 premium video platforms beat YouTube on connected TV across four measures, led by 33% stronger co-viewing. The figures are taken from The Impression Gap, a report VAB produced with measurement company TVision and released on February 24, 2026. The infographic itself carries no data source, date range, sample size or methodology note.

In Short

A trade group that represents TV and streaming companies made a colorful chart saying people watch Netflix, Hulu and similar apps together more often, and look at the screen more, than when they watch YouTube on a TV. That matters to advertisers deciding where to spend video budgets, but the group sells the very inventory it is praising. The numbers come from a study published in February, and the chart leaves out how that study was done, so anyone reading it has to go back to the original report to judge it.

What VAB sent

The email arrived from VAB on October 20, 2026, under the subject line "What's the real difference between Premium Video and YouTube?" It promotes what it labels a "NEW INFOGRAPHIC" and links to a page on thevab.com titled "Spot the Difference & See How Premium Video Platforms Deliver." The link carries a campaign tag naming an October 20 insights release. Three documents were reviewed for this article: the email, the web page and the infographic file.

The infographic is a two-page PDF built in Canva. Its file metadata records a creation date of September 8, 2026, six weeks before the email went out. The web page shows no publication date, so it is not clear whether the infographic was posted on the site before the October 20 email.

Access is gated. The web page shows a locked preview of both pages with the words "unlock the infographic" and "get the answers now!" According to the email, "Marketers, Agencies, and VAB Members get free, immediate access to our full library of guides, glossaries, case studies and more." Readers are asked to create an account to download.

The framing does not hedge. According to VAB's web page, "Premium Video Platforms drive stronger attention and greater value for brands compared to YouTube." The infographic's first page states: "When it comes to CTV audiences the difference is clear. Premium Video Platforms deliver superior attention & greater value for marketers than YouTube." The second page closes with the line: "Want more on how Premium Video Platforms reign supreme? Download the full report: The Impression Gap!"

The four numbers

The first page lists four figures under the caption "Average Premium Video Platform Lift vs. YouTube on CTV":

  • +33% "stronger co-viewing"
  • +5% "more likely to be in the room when the TV is on"
  • +14% "more likely to have their eyes on screen"
  • +18% "more likely to keep their eyes on screen"

None of these is new. All four match the category averages in The Impression Gap, which PPC Land covered when VAB and TVision released it in February. In that report, premium platforms averaged a 60% co-viewing rate against 45% for YouTube. The presence-to-active index stood at 102 for premium platforms and 97 for YouTube. Attention to presence was 108 against 95, and attention to duration was 110 against 93.

The arithmetic holds. Sixty divided by 45 gives the 33% lift. The other three ratios work out to roughly 5%, 14% and 18%, which is what the infographic prints. VAB has rounded nothing in its own favor.

What "more likely" turns into

The wording is a different matter. Three of the four figures in the report are indices, normalized so that 100 equals the average for all CTV viewing. A ratio between two indices is a relative difference in a score. The infographic restates each of those ratios as a probability: viewers are "more likely" to be in the room, "more likely" to have their eyes on screen, "more likely" to keep them there.

That is a looser claim than the report makes. The presence-to-active index, as described in the February report, measures time in the room as a share of the active session. Attention to presence measures eyes on screen while a viewer is in the room. Attention to duration measures eyes on screen relative to total session length. None of them measures the probability that a given viewer is present or watching. The infographic's second page defines the terms in a single plain-language line each - "What is Attention to Presence? More likely to have their eyes on screen," for example - and the index basis disappears.

Only the co-viewing figure is a share of impressions, and even there the infographic's definition, "More likely to watch with others in the room," compresses a narrower rule. The report counted an impression as co-viewed when at least one other viewer was present during overlapping active sessions of five minutes or more.

What the infographic leaves out

The infographic contains no footnote at all. Its text was checked page by page, as were its images and link annotations. There are no hyperlinks in the PDF, including on the underlined report title at the bottom of page two.

Measured against the report, at least six pieces of information are missing:

Data source. TVision is not named anywhere in the infographic, the web page or the email. The only attribution is to "the MarCom Award-winning report The Impression Gap." Neither document gives the award's year or category, and the email spells the name "MarComm."

Fieldwork window. The report's data ran from July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025. That window closed almost 16 months before the October 20 email.

Sample. The February report described "thousands of households" in the United States without an exact count. Viant, which closed its acquisition of TVision on May 5, 2026, described the panel at that time as 5,000 households.

Method. TVision's panel combines in-room sensors that use person and facial recognition, a digital meter that identifies the streaming app, and automatic content recognition, all captured second by second.

Session thresholds. The report applied different minimums to the two sides. A YouTube session counted after 30 seconds of viewing, while a premium platform session needed five minutes. PPC Land noted in August that this asymmetry excludes short premium sessions that would have been counted on YouTube, which can raise the premium averages.

Platform spread. The infographic reports only averages. According to PPC Land's earlier coverage of the report, several individual premium apps scored below YouTube on some measures, and the lowest non-YouTube platform on co-viewing, an SVOD service, came in at 42%, below YouTube's 45%.

There is a fifth metric in the report that the infographic drops entirely. Session length - 1 hour 18 minutes on average for premium platforms against 52 minutes for YouTube, a 49% difference - was the widest category gap in the study. It does not appear in "Spot the Difference," and the documents give no reason.

Who counts as premium

The second page groups 21 services into three bands. Under "Hybrid (AVOD/SVOD)" the logos are Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Peacock, Prime Video, Paramount+, BET+, Netflix, Discovery en Español, AMC+ and Univision's NOW. Under vMVPD sit Xfinity, Spectrum and YouTube TV. The FAST band shows Pluto TV, Xumo, Tubi, Roku, Fawesome, Plex and Canela.TV.

The count of 21 matches the report. The grouping does not quite: the February coverage of the report described session-length results for four app types, including a pure SVOD category averaging exactly one hour, while the infographic shows only three bands and places Netflix among the hybrids.

One logo stands out. YouTube TV, Google's live TV subscription, sits on the premium side of the chart, as a vMVPD. The report measured only the main YouTube app, including user-uploaded content, and classified YouTube TV with the cable-style bundles. The infographic's illustrations, which show a lone viewer drifting away from a television playing a YouTube video while five people sit in front of a grid of streaming logos, do not explain that distinction. A reader skimming the chart could take "YouTube" to mean everything Google streams to a television. It does not.

A familiar argument, repackaged

The October 20 email is at least the fourth time this year that VAB has put the same 12-month TVision dataset in front of buyers. After the February launch, the trade body promoted the report again in June for National Streaming Month, and PPC Land reported a headline claim of 49% more engagement that turned out to be the session-length figure. In late August, VAB's summer school email linked the report once more, under a headline built on a 94% ad completion rate from 2023 FreeWheel data.

VAB's position is not neutral. Its members include the networks and streaming services that sell premium video inventory, and YouTube is their largest competitor for television ad budgets. Nielsen's Gauge put YouTube at 13.8% of all US TV viewing in May 2026, ahead of any single streaming service, with Netflix at 8.0%. The infographic is advocacy material in that contest, and VAB does not present it as anything else; the web page's subtitle reads "More attention. More impact. More value."

Google has been making its own case on the same ground. On June 2, 2026, Google Ads began counting co-viewers in its campaign reach metrics, citing a 2022 Nielsen study that found multiple adults watched YouTube together on TV 26% of the time, against 22% for linear TV. In September, YouTube added a modelled "views co-viewed" estimate to creator analytics, with no published error bands. Neither company's figures are directly comparable with the other's: TVision observes rooms through sensors, while Google's numbers rely on modelling and older panel data.

That is the real dispute behind the cartoon chairs. Co-viewing has become a currency question, because every extra person in the room multiplies the audience an advertiser pays for. VAB's figures say premium apps gather more of those people and hold their gaze longer. Google's say YouTube on a TV screen is already a shared experience. The infographic answers neither side's measurement critique.

Why the gap in disclosure matters

For buyers who use attention metrics to weigh CTV inventory, the gap between an index ratio and a "more likely" claim is not cosmetic. A 14% difference in an attention index normalized to all CTV viewing is a statement about the average quality of an impression on one group of apps relative to another. It says nothing about outcomes for a given campaign. The Impression Gap itself did not measure sales or brand lift; the outcome statistics in the report were drawn from separate third-party studies by Magnite, Thinkbox, WARC, Adelaide and Dentsu.

The comparison is also of category averages. A buyer choosing between two specific apps learns nothing from the infographic about where either sits, and the report showed premium platforms spread widely. The top performer reached 174.0 on attention to duration, while YouTube came in at 92.6 and ranked 14th of 19 entries. The report's coverage noted that its chart listed 19 entries against 21 named premium platforms, a discrepancy VAB has not explained.

Is it still current? The fieldwork ended in June 2025. Since then, Nielsen has changed its local tuning thresholds, Google has redefined its reach metrics, and YouTube has added co-viewing estimates for creators. The infographic presents 2024-25 behavior as the state of "today's CTV landscape," in the web page's words, without saying when the data was collected.

None of this means the figures are wrong. The ratios are correctly calculated from the report, and TVision's sensor panel is one of the few sources that observes who is actually in front of a television. But a chart built to be shared on its own, with no source line, is the version most likely to reach a media plan without the report behind it.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Video Advertising Bureau, a trade body whose members include premium TV and streaming providers, using data from measurement company TVision, now owned by Viant. YouTube is the comparison target; YouTube TV is counted on the premium side.

What: A two-page infographic, "Spot the Difference," claiming that 21 premium video platforms beat YouTube on CTV by 33% on co-viewing, 5% on presence, 14% on attention to presence and 18% on attention to duration. The figures repeat The Impression Gap report but omit its source, fieldwork window, sample, method, session thresholds and session-length result, and restate index ratios as "more likely" claims.

When: VAB emailed the infographic on October 20, 2026. The file was created on September 8, 2026, the report was released on February 24, 2026, and the underlying data covers July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025.

Where: United States connected TV viewing, distributed by email and through a gated page on thevab.com.

Why: VAB is making the case to marketers that premium streaming impressions are worth more than YouTube impressions on television, in a market where YouTube holds the largest single share of US TV viewing and where Google and the TV industry are using competing co-viewing measures to argue over audience size.