Not at all surprising. Youtube has a great diversity of content. Netflix is paid, and the content is often low quality (shows that start strong and get cancelled), and customers have to put up with politically influenced content as well.

> “YouTube’s evolution from a social video service into a dominant global attention platform is one of the defining media shifts of the decade,” said Digital i’s chief analytics officer, Matt Ross. “Our data shows audiences increasingly treating YouTube not as social media, but as a primary entertainment destination.”

But what is surprising is that this is being recognized only now. I feel like this was true even 5 years ago. Maybe longer.

Maybe also because Netflix is getting ridiculously expensive while YouTube is free and has way more 'content categories'

Not just me then. I haven't sat down to watch linear TV in about 15 years. And for the past 10 I mainly watch YouTube.

For a long time I felt the construction of shows. The way they try to artificially raise tension and intrigue, and that most of them had such poor writing, be it predictable dialog or just characters doing illogical things for the plot to happen.

So now I watch mostly informative or edutainment on YouTube. Such a wealth of very varied content. And so easy to skip the overly fabricated stuff.

Do we replace the N in FAANG (or MAANG) with a Y? .. FAAYG .... and/or merge with G, as another A for Alphabet? FAAA? ;)

A few days ago, the YouTube algo recommended me a fan-made, 3 1/2 hour animated rendition of Star Wars: Heir to the Empire. The animation and voice acting were very crude compared to a professionally made film, and yet I got about halfway through it because the story was so much more compelling than anything coming out of Lucasfilm not named Andor.

The care and work that went into the project was very evident and appreciated despite the production limitations, and gave me hope that fan-driven projects will eventually be able to compete, at least in some regards, to the mediocre projects coming out of big studios.