Streaming Wars Still Raging On YouTube

The so-called Streaming Wars may have cooled in terms of how the actual services are competing with one another for subscribers. But on YouTube, many of the top services have seen an uptick in unique viewers as they continue to battle it out for fall season attention.

Data from Tubular Labs shows Hulu, HBO Max, Peacock, Prime Video and Netflix all seeing significant month-over-month growth in U.S. unique YouTube viewers, with nearly all hitting one-year highs. 

Hulu led the pack at 46.2 million unique U.S. viewers in October; a 224% month-over-month increase to jump to No. 1 among all domestic media & entertainment companies. HBO Max was hot on its heels at No. 3, however, with 41.4 million unique viewers (up 384% vs. September).

The key for all of these streaming services was a rush of TV trailers to coincide with fall primetime schedules coming back. Hulu, in particular, received some lift from two separate Kardashian vehicles – trailers for the new season of The Kardashians and All’s Fair starring Kim accounted for four of the service’s top six videos.

HBO Max primarily leveraged IT: Welcome To Derry to capitalize on Halloween and spooky programming interest and drive tune-in for the new show. Peacock and Prime Video focused on a mix of sports programming (the NBA, in particular) and various show trailers.

While these services all put some money behind these videos as ads, the emphasis on doing so – especially when they didn’t last year – shows a new strategy for how they plan to get households (whether they’ve already subscribed or not) tuned in.