NFL’s Watch-Time Sprints Past Previous Highs

Thanks in part to YouTube hosting a live Chargers vs. Chiefs game from Brazil, the NFL’s September YouTube watch-time soared past previous high-water marks.

As the league returned to action, Tubular Labs data reveals that the NFL hit 1.3 billion U.S. minutes watched on YouTube for the month, which was No. 2 among all domestic media creators.

• The figure was also significantly higher than anything the NFL had achieved dating back over a year. Last September, the NFL hit 797 million minutes – or 61% of this September’s total, which grew 59% compared to August alone.
• While year-over-year increases like that can sometimes be fueled by an increase in publishing volume, for the NFL, there was actually a decrease from last September (from 1,587 videos to 1,328).
• The bigger adjustment came from a move away from Shorts, to an extent. The league uploaded over 1,110 Shorts in Sept. 2024 to 858 this September, while increasing the number of videos running 10 minutes or longer (from 197 to 245).

Pushing more “longer” videos this year helped fuel watch-time gains, and played directly to fan tendencies to watch shorter highlights of games they may have missed. While Shorts still performed well in Sept. 2025, the NFL is also showing how they’ve identified a limit of how much to invest there while putting additional focus on content more apt to be viewed via TV.