YouTube has surged past TikTok in the short-form video race, with Shorts now averaging 200 billion views every single day.
The massive milestone was announced by CEO Neal Mohan during his keynote at the 2025 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. It’s a huge leap from the 70 billion daily views YouTube Shorts saw in March 2024, marking a 186% increase in just over a year.
“Today, I’m excited to share a new milestone: YouTube Shorts are now averaging over 200 billion daily views,” Mohan said.
For comparison, TikTok’s daily view count was last reported at around 1 billion, according to data from Sendshort. That means YouTube isn’t just ahead, it’s lapped its biggest rival.
It should be noted that on March 31, 2025, YouTube changed how it counted “views” by taking a page out of TikTok’s book by making it so that when users scroll past a Short, even if it’s after a second, it’s still counted as a “view.”
YouTube dominates the streaming space
Mohan also highlighted another major shift in how people consume content on the platform. Over 1 billion hours of YouTube are watched on TV screens each day, showing just how far the platform has expanded beyond phones and computers.
According to Nielsen’s latest Gauge report, YouTube claimed 12.5 percent of all US TV viewership in May. That puts it ahead of every other streaming service, such as Netflix and Disney Plus, and traditional broadcaster for the fourth month in a row.
“For more than half of the top 100 most-watched YouTube channels in the world, TV is their most-watched screen,” Mohan added.
With Shorts dominating mobile and traditional YouTube content thriving on TVs, the platform is now leading across formats.
YouTube has been going all-in on Shorts in recent months, allowing users to search for anything they see in them.
With Shorts generating so many views, YouTube also opted to include ads on the content for paying YouTube Premium Lite subscribers, meaning that users will need a standard, more expensive Premium plan to enjoy unlimited Shorts ad-free.
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