YouTube took 15.8% of all US television viewing time in August 2026, the highest share the platform has recorded in Nielsen's monthly measurement, according to the August editions of The Gauge and the Media Distributor Gauge, which Nielsen published on October 22, 2026. The record came in a month when Americans watched less television overall. Total TV usage fell 4.4% from July as the FIFA World Cup 2026 ended and children returned to school.

The release covers a five-week interval, from July 27 to August 30, 2026. It is the last Gauge report built on Nielsen's current method. Nielsen has said that September and October will be published together "later this year," after a one-time methodology adjustment intended to bring the report in line with its TV currency data. No September 2026 Gauge has been published.

In Short

Nielsen counts how much time Americans spend watching TV and splits it between streaming, cable, broadcast and other uses, and in August people watched less TV overall, but YouTube's slice got bigger, reaching 15.8%. This matters because advertisers and media companies use these shares to argue over where TV budgets should go. The next report, for September, will use a different counting method, so it will not line up neatly with August.

The headline numbers

Streaming finished August with 49.6% of TV watch-time, up 0.6 share points from 49.0% in July. That increase did not come from more streaming. According to Nielsen, overall streaming usage fell 3.2% in August. Because total TV usage dropped faster, at 4.4%, streaming's slice of a shrinking total grew.

The same arithmetic worked for cable. Cable usage declined 3%, but the category gained 0.2 share points to reach 18.9% of television. Broadcast was the exception. Broadcast viewing declined 14% from July, and the category lost 2.0 share points to finish at 17.5%.

The remainder, which Nielsen labels "Other" in its chart, accounted for 14.0%. That category is not a platform. It captures television set use that does not fall into streaming, cable or broadcast. Based on the shares Nielsen published for July (streaming 49.0%, broadcast 19.5%, cable 18.7%), the Other category stood at roughly 12.8% in July, a PPC Land calculation, so it rose by about 1.2 points.

Nielsen's chart describes the measure as "Total Day | Persons 2+" and names its source as "Nielsen National TV Panel plus Streaming Platform Ratings." The centre of the chart carries a note that matters for anyone using the figures in negotiations: "The Gauge and Media Distributor Gauge (MDG) do not reflect Nielsen's currency TV ratings."

YouTube's record month

YouTube was the only major platform whose viewing went up in absolute terms. According to Nielsen, monthly YouTube viewing climbed 6% in August. That took its share to 15.8%, up 1.6 points from the 14.2% record it set in July.

The audience behind the gain is less obvious than the headline suggests. Nielsen states that viewing among 6-17 year-olds "faced back-to-school headwinds," while YouTube "benefited from a 9% increase in viewing among adults 50 and older." Nielsen did not publish an age breakdown of YouTube's total viewing, so the release does not show what share of the platform's August minutes came from older adults.

The streaming ranking in Nielsen's August chart reads as follows:

  • YouTube: 15.8%
  • Netflix: 7.7%
  • Disney (Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu SVOD): 4.8%
  • Prime Video: 4.2%
  • The Roku Channel: 2.9%
  • Paramount (Paramount+ and Pluto): 2.3%
  • Tubi: 1.9%
  • Peacock: 1.6%
  • Warner Bros. Discovery (Discovery+ and HBO Max): 1.4%
  • Other streaming: 7.1%

YouTube's share is now more than double Netflix's. Disney Streaming and Paramount Streaming each added 0.1 share point in August, according to Nielsen.

Peacock gives back its World Cup gains

Peacock moved the other way. Its share fell 1.0 point to 1.6% of TV, which Nielsen attributes to the end of Telemundo's World Cup coverage and of the latest season of Love Island USA, both in July. Nielsen points out that Peacock was still up 0.2 share points compared with August 2025.

The drop reverses most of a two-month climb. Peacock reached 2.3% of TV in the June Gauge, up 0.5 points, and 2.6% in July, when Nielsen reported its viewing up 15% from June. August put it back below the level it held before the tournament reached its peak.

The Media Distributor Gauge reshuffle

The Media Distributor Gauge groups viewing by parent company across broadcast, cable and streaming. YouTube kept first place, with the same 15.8% it holds in the streaming chart.

Below YouTube, the order changed sharply. According to Nielsen:

  • Disney added 0.4 share points and returned to No. 2 with 9.3% of TV.
  • Netflix moved up to No. 3 with 7.7%, ahead of NBCU+Versant by 0.03 share points.
  • NBCU+Versant fell to No. 4.
  • Paramount added 0.3 points and climbed to No. 5 with 6.8%.
  • FOX moved to No. 6 with 5.6%.

Nielsen did not give NBCU+Versant's August share in the release text, and the distributor chart on its page did not render. The 0.03-point gap puts it just below 7.7%. Its July share was 9.2%, so the World Cup co-rightsholder lost roughly 1.5 points in a month, a PPC Land calculation from the two releases. FOX fell further. It held 7.8% and the No. 3 position in July, according to Nielsen's July release, which means its August share of 5.6% represents a drop of 2.2 points.

Those two companies carried the tournament. In June, FOX gained 0.9 points to 7.4% of US TV on more than 84 billion World Cup viewing minutes across FOX and NBCUniversal properties. The August figures show how quickly those shares unwind once a major live event ends.

NBCUniversal and Versant are reported as one entity. According to Nielsen's footnote, this is "because advertising sales for Versant are still retained by NBCUniversal, and to preserve data trends and insights in these reports," with each company's share shown separately in the chart.

Broadcast: sports drop from 30% to under 9%

Broadcast's 14% decline is the largest movement in the release. Nielsen describes it as the category settling "into its typical August slowdown ahead of football season." The World Cup's absence explains much of it. Sports fell to less than 9% of broadcast viewing in August, compared with 30% in July.

A second factor is audience composition. According to Nielsen, Hispanic audiences represented a 30% increase in broadcast viewing from May to June and kept viewing steady through July. In August, broadcast usage among Hispanic viewers declined 30%. Nielsen does not break that figure down by network or program.

With sports gone, dramas made up 22% of broadcast viewing and news 18%. ABC World News Tonight topped both the broadcast program and telecast rankings. NBC's NFL preseason coverage ranked sixth among broadcast telecasts, which Nielsen describes as "offering a preview of football's return in September."

Cable: sports rebound, news stays largest

Cable moved in the opposite direction on sports. Cable sports viewing rose 26% in August, nearly offsetting the 27% decline it recorded in July. ESPN's coverage of the North Carolina-TCU college football game on August 29 was the top cable telecast of the month.

Even with that rebound, sports remained a small part of cable. News accounted for 25% of cable viewing in August and sports 8.2%, according to Nielsen.

What the August interval covers

Nielsen's measurement months do not match calendar months. According to the release, "Nielsen reporting follows the broadcast calendar, with weekly intervals beginning on Monday." The August 2026 interval ran for five weeks, from July 27 through August 30. The July interval was four weeks long, running June 29 to July 26.

Nielsen's share figures are not affected by interval length, because they are percentages of the total within each period. The usage changes, such as the 4.4% decline in total TV and the 6% increase for YouTube, are comparisons between periods of different length. The release does not state whether those are total or average weekly figures, so the exact basis for the percentages is not given.

Why there is no September Gauge yet

The final note in the release is the part with the longest reach. Nielsen writes that The Gauge, the Media Distributor Gauge and the Ad Supported Gauge "will undergo a one-time methodology adjustment beginning with the September 2026 measurement interval to align with Nielsen's TV currency data." It adds: "Therefore, Nielsen will publish the September and October intervals together later this year." No date is given.

The release dates already show the report slipping. Nielsen published the June Gauge on August 18 and the July Gauge on September 10. The August edition followed on October 22, 53 days after the interval closed on August 30. A combined September and October release cannot come before the October interval ends, which on the broadcast calendar falls at the end of the month.

The adjustment has a history. In March, Nielsen's Gauge delay sparked a market integrity row. Nielsen delayed the February 2026 report, which was originally due March 17, after streaming platforms asked for more information, and then reverted to its prior method until fall 2026. Unreleased February figures, reported by the Wall Street Journal on March 19, showed linear TV at 47.4% of viewing and streaming at 41.9%, against 42.7% and 47% in January. The Video Advertising Bureau called the delay and reversal "indefensible manipulations."

The issue followed Netflix into its earnings. When Netflix reported its first-quarter results in April, co-CEO Greg Peters said Nielsen's change altered Nielsen's numbers, not actual viewing, and that "Nielsen Gauge is not the currency for the video marketplace." The method based on Advertising Research Foundation data was scheduled for full Gauge implementation in fall 2026, after the 2026-27 upfront negotiations.

Meanwhile, the currency itself moved. Nielsen set August 31 for seven changes to US TV ratings currency, covering co-viewing captured through wrist-worn wearables, a latency-adjusted universe estimate, household demographic assignment, integrated weighting, Hispanic universe estimation, an ACR tuning adjustment and householding for one big data provider. On the same day, Nielsen cut its local TV tuning threshold from five minutes to one, a change it says addresses "upwards of 24 percent of tuning events" going unreported.

The August Gauge interval ended on August 30, one day before those currency changes took effect. That makes August the last edition produced entirely under the old Gauge method, and the last one directly comparable with the series running back to 2021.

Why it matters for advertisers and publishers

The Nielsen Gauge is not a trading currency. It does not set ad rates. Its influence comes from how it is used: buyers and media owners cite it in upfront negotiations and budget discussions, and the distributor ranking appears in merger materials and investor presentations. A month in which broadcast lost 2.0 points, YouTube added 1.6 and the No. 2 through No. 6 distributor positions changed hands gives each side material to argue with.

The August figures also show how much of the summer's movement came from a single event. Broadcast reached 19.8% of TV in June, its first June share increase since the Gauge launched in 2021, driven by World Cup and NBA Finals viewing. Ad-supported viewing fell to 71.5% in the second quarter, down from 72.8% in the first quarter, according to the Ad Supported Gauge released on August 25. Read alone, June and July suggested a broadcast recovery. August puts broadcast back at 17.5%, below where it started the summer.

For streaming, the picture is a share gain on falling usage. The 49.6% figure is a record for the category, but it was reached because linear TV lost viewers faster than streaming did, not because streaming time grew. The 50% mark that streaming has approached through 2026 will now be tested under a new method.

There is also a structural point in YouTube's numbers. The platform's growth among adults 50 and older runs against the assumption that YouTube's TV-set viewing is driven mainly by younger audiences. The release provides one month of data for that group, without a year-over-year comparison, so it does not establish a trend.

For anyone tracking audience measurement more broadly, the practical consequence is a break in the series. When September and October arrive together, they will reflect a method aligned with the currency changes of August 31. Nielsen has said it is sharing "further impact data" with clients and "allowing additional time to evaluate the trends," but it has not published how large the adjustment will be. Whether the switch helps streaming, broadcast or neither is the question the next release will answer, and until it does, the August figures are the final reading under the old rules.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Nielsen, with YouTube, Disney, Netflix, NBCU+Versant, Paramount, FOX and Peacock as the platforms and distributors measured, and US advertisers, broadcasters and streamers as the parties who use the figures.

What: The August 2026 Gauge and Media Distributor Gauge showed total TV usage down 4.4% from July, streaming at 49.6% of TV, cable at 18.9%, broadcast at 17.5% and YouTube at a record 15.8%. Disney returned to No. 2 among distributors, while FOX and NBCU+Versant fell after the World Cup.

When: Nielsen published the reports on October 22, 2026. The measurement interval ran from July 27 to August 30, 2026. September and October will be published together later in 2026.

Where: United States, measuring television set viewing across broadcast, cable and streaming for persons aged 2 and older.

Why: The end of the World Cup and the back-to-school decline cut viewing, with broadcast down 14%. The release is the last Gauge under Nielsen's current method, before a one-time adjustment to align the report with its TV currency data, which breaks direct comparison with earlier months.