Ofcom's 2023 viewing data lumps TikTok in with YouTube

What was announced or recorded

On 31 July 2024, Ofcom, the UK's communications regulator, published Media Nations 2024, its annual account of how people in the UK watch television and video. The report draws on Barb, the industry body that meters in-home viewing on panel households, and on Ofcom's own online surveys. It covers calendar year 2023 and is a measurement record rather than an announcement: a panel counted the viewing, nobody decided it.

What the documents establish

The full UK report states that people aged four and over spent an average of 4 hours 31 minutes a day watching video at home in 2023, up 2% on 2022. Daily viewing of video-sharing platforms (VSPs) rose 12% to 49 minutes, and broadcaster video-on-demand rose 29% to 20 minutes. A footnote defines a VSP as any platform letting users upload and share video, ad-funded or subscription-funded, and names three: YouTube, TikTok and Twitch. Barb's meter cannot separate them inside that 49-minute figure; there is no TikTok-only minutes-per-day number in the document. A second measure in the same report, Ofcom's self-report VoD Survey, asks YouTube viewers what they watch rather than metering it: 47% said they watched YouTube Shorts, up from 36% in 2023, against 62% for longer videos. That is a share of viewers reporting a behaviour, not a share of viewing time, and the two figures should not be compared directly.

Announced versus delivered

Because this is a measurement record rather than a plan, the useful distinction is between what the panel counts and what it cannot see. Barb meters television sets and other devices on a panel household's home Wi-Fi network, so its VSP figure captures YouTube, TikTok and Twitch wherever they appear there. It has no category for episodic vertical-drama apps such as ReelShort or DramaBox, which are not named platforms and would fall into whatever generic bucket, if any, Barb assigns to unlisted services. The report is silent on that point, which is itself informative: a fast-growing paid-episode format can be absent from a national viewing survey without the survey being wrong about what it does measure.

What to watch

Editorially, the figure worth tracking next year is whether Ofcom starts breaking VSPs into named platforms the way it already does for YouTube, or whether TikTok stays folded into an aggregate that also includes Twitch. That reporting choice, not just the minutes, would signal how much weight regulators give a single short-form platform.

• Does a cited 'social video' or 'VSP' figure name the platforms inside it, or only the category?
• Is the measurement a metered minutes-per-day panel or a self-reported survey, and are the two mixed in one claim?
• Would a paid, episodic vertical-drama app register in this system at all, or does it fall outside every named category?

Media Nations can say that video-sharing platforms took 12% more of the day in 2023, but not how much of that growth was TikTok, YouTube or Twitch, and it says nothing about the coin-paid drama apps outside its three named platforms.