• by Wayne Friedman , 8 hours ago

YouTube continued to see stronger results compared to other media companies in TV viewing share -- 12.4%, up from 29% from a year ago (9.6%), according to the Nielsen Media Distributor Gauge for April. It was YouTube's third straight month at the top of this chart.

Second-place Walt Disney dropped 7% to 10.7% (versus 11.5% share a year ago). Disney did gain 0.2 percentage points from March of this year due to the NFL draft, the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship and the first round of the NBA Playoffs. It also had April’s top entertainment TV series, “Grey’s Anatomy,” with 3.9 billion minutes.

NBCU was in fourth place -- down 7% to 8.2% versus 8.9% a year ago -- but up from 8.0% in March.

While there was growth from March of this year, Warner Bros. Discovery took a major hit in industry-wide share comparisons -- sinking 17% to 6.7% share year-over-year.

At the same time, Nielsen says there was a 58% rise in viewership versus March -- thanks to 18 first-round games of the NBA Playoffs on TNT and the HBO series “The White Lotus” on Max -- the second-most watched TV series in April, with 3.7 billion viewing minutes.

Two other legacy TV-based network media companies made gains. Paramount inched up 8.9% (from 8.8%) year-over-year. Nielsen says there were viewership gains from its CBS broadcast affiliates, which drove more than half of Paramount’s monthly growth from March -- up 0.4 points.

Among legacy TV-media companies, Fox Corp. had the biggest gains in year-over-year viewership -- up 11% from a year ago to 6.8% (from 6.1%) -- driven by higher viewership at Fox News Channel and gains at its free, ad-supported streaming platform Tubi. However, it was down 0.2 points from March’s 7.0% share.

Results for digital-first companies were mixed. Amazon Prime Video was up 9% t0 3.5% year-over-year -- at the same share level as in March of this year -- while Netflix slipped 1% to a 7.5% (down from 7.6%) year-over-year and off 0.4 points from its 7.9% level in March.

In April of this year, Roku gained 71% to 2.4% versus April 2024, compared to 2.2% in March.