Sometimes the news arrives not as a surprise, but as a head-slapping realisation.
It emerged yesterday that Google handed the UK’s TV measurement body a cease-and-desist letter for doing something very simple: measuring YouTube like television.
Not impressions nor claims. Actual viewing on TV sets, reported through BARB, using the same panel-based methodology that has underpinned UK TV trading for four decades.
This wasn’t some rogue experiment. It was a “world first” initiative, publicly announced last summer. You know, that same summer YouTube told Cannes Lions that it was “the new TV”.
Importantly, Barb’s service was designed to answer a question YouTube itself has been pushing the industry to ask: how much YouTube is being watched on the living-room screen, as opposed to phones and tablets?
The answer, it turns out, was awkward. And that’s when the lawyers appeared.
A reminder of the argument Google would rather we forget
This news broke a couple of days after I wrote in The Media Leader that Alphabet’s behaviour around YouTube only makes sense when viewed through the lens of regulatory risk.
I quoted Peter Thiel’s observation that monopolies rarely describe themselves honestly. Instead, they expand the frame around their business to obscure where power really sits.
Alphabet is no longer “just” a search company. It is, depending on the day, an AI leader, a cloud giant, a mobility pioneer—and now, insistently, a connected-TV platform via YouTube.
The thing is: while diversification narratives are cheap, regulatory filings are not.
I mean, have you noticed how candid Alphabet is about its fears when it speaks to investors rather than marketers? The risks are not competition nor product obsolescence.
Alphabet fears regulation. Antitrust remedies. Forced changes to products, data access, or market structure.
Search advertising is the obvious exposure. Less openly discussed—but increasingly sensitive—is video.
YouTube has become the default global layer for video attention. For advertisers, it is increasingly unavoidable. For regulators, that creates a second monopoly-shaped problem just as pressure mounts on the first.
This is where the head slap happens.
Because, seen through that lens, what happened with BARB is not strange. It is revealing.
If YouTube really wanted to be TV, this would be easy
The defence from Google is actually quite technical and procedural: BARB and Kantar allegedly breached terms of service by using creator APIs to attribute viewing to specific channels.
But that misses the point.
If YouTube genuinely believed BARB’s measurement was flawed, unrepresentative, or methodologically weak, there was an obvious response available: publish the counter-evidence. Explain the gaps. Show the numbers. Engage.
That is how television has worked for decades. Measurement systems are argued over, refined, and occasionally overhauled—but always in the open, because trading depends on shared confidence.
Instead, Google shut the service down.
That decision matters because of what BARB represents. Not perfection, but legibility: a common currency. A system that allows buyers and sellers to argue about value using the same language.
If you want to be treated like TV, that is the price of entry.
Update (29 Jan 2026):
This point about how YouTube could be more transparent is worth a bit more detail.
In the UK alone, Google already engages with — or has visibility of — at least three different measurement routes for YouTube.
First, YouTube viewing on TV sets is captured via BARB’s panel infrastructure, using Kantar Media’s audio-matching technology to identify content watched on connected TVs. This is the system Google has now moved to halt.
Second, YouTube is measured through other industry-agreed frameworks used for advertising reach and planning, including systems such as Origin. In fact, Google helped deliver the technical build for Origin, as Origin’s CEO Phil Smith explained during my interview with him in 2024. Indeed Google and Meta were early funders of Origin, which is designed to satisfy advertisers’ needs for cross-media reach rather than programme-style ratings.
Third, Google operates and participates in its own research panels and data programmes, such as Screenwise, which provide additional insight into viewing behaviour across devices.
It’s also worth noting that Origin uses an audience panel built by Kantar, and Screenwise is a product of Google and, er, Kantar. (The Kantar Media division is longer part of Kantar after it was sold off to private equity last year).
The important point is not that these systems are identical — they are not. They differ in scope, methodology, and purpose. But taken together, they underline something important: Google already has multiple vantage points on YouTube viewing.
“It does seem odd that YouTube has spent so much effort trying to convince advertisers that it is TV and so gain the benefits of that reputation, but the moment there’s some TV-like scrutiny, it goes legal to avoid it. If they want to be treated like TV, they need to be transparent.”
Lindsey Clay, Thinkbox CEO
Clay is correct to point out the contradiction, but, as I argued in my column, this behaviour isn’t necessarily “odd” at all.
YouTube’s inconsistency — embracing television rhetorically while resisting its institutions — is not a bug, but a feature.
At times, YouTube behaves like a broadcaster: bidding for sports rights, talking up long-form viewing, leaning hard into the “living room” narrative. At other times, it reverts to platform reflexes: proprietary metrics, selective data access, legal enforcement of terms.
That slippery strategy may seem confusing to veteran TV execs who see divergence from ‘how things are done’. For YouTube, it’s calibration.
Because YouTube, in service to the Alphabet mothership, needs to look enough like television to muddy market definitions and unlock TV budgets. But not so much like television that it inherits television’s regulatory scrutiny, measurement discipline, or comparability.
BARB-style reporting threatens that balance. It collapses the ambiguity.
Why this particular measurement mattered
The reason BARB’s YouTube reporting became a big story last summer is not because anyone expected it to dethrone broadcast TV.
It was because, astonishingly, there was no independent, verifiable view of what was actually being watched on TV sets. And when that reporting arrived, it told an uncomfortable story.
Viewing was heavily skewed toward young children. Anyone who has young children, like me, wouldn’t be surprised in the least. YouTube is a free way to give your kids screen time watching Peppa Pig while you can quietly scroll your phone like a zombie in the corner of the living room.
And guess what — there’s nothing wrong with that.
You think the millions who watch daytime TV every day are all intensely taking notes while Cat Deeley watches someone fry an egg (I assume)?
More devastating for YouTube, I suspect, was that the familiar flagship creators that dominate headlines and conference stages had, in fact, delivered modest reach on TV screens.
MrBeast taking over the world? On screens, he can’t even eclipse Mr. Men.
But this is how markets are supposed to work: information. The sort of information that allows money to move rationally rather than rhetorically.
From Alphabet’s perspective, however, it sharpens a different risk: the risk that YouTube becomes legible or understandable in ways that invite regulatory comparison with both search and television.
What this leaves advertisers to decide
Television accepts scrutiny because it has to; whether it’s a joint industry currency like BARB/Kantar Media in the UK or Nielsen in the US. It’s a noisy, competitive sector which still wields huge cultural power as well as economic influence.
Platforms like YouTube have, until now, been able to resist scrutiny because “the internet” has degraded into an export vehicle for American tech products which must be accepted, wholesale, by the rest of the world.
So Google’s cease-and-desist letter is not odd, nor does it contradict YouTube’s stated ambition to be “the new TV”. It actually clarifies the extent to which it is determined to smash through joint industry standards, while the noise and debris obscures what it really fears from more transparency and accountability.
The industry should plan accordingly.
Source: omaroakes.substack.com