YouTube has crossed another major milestone. The platform’s short-form video offering YouTube Shorts is now averaging 200 billion daily views, according to CEO Neal Mohan, who shared the news during his keynote at the 2025 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
This marks a roughly 186% increase in daily viewership compared to a year ago. In March of 2024, YouTube reported that its Shorts offering was averaging 70 billion daily views since its launch in 2021.
During his keynote, Mohan also revealed that viewers are watching over 1 billion hours of YouTube on their TVs daily. As staggering as that number is, it’s not entirely surprising — in May, YouTube led Nielsen’s The Gauge report for the fourth consecutive month in a row, meaning the platform was the most-watched of any streaming service or channel. YouTube accounted for 12.5% of all TV viewership during that month, the largest share of overall viewership any streamer or channel The Gauge has ever reported.
“For more than half of the top 100 most-watched YouTube channels in the world, TV is their most-watched screen,” Mohan said.
On the heels of YouTube Shorts’ increased popularity, he also announced that Veo 3 will be coming to the platform later this summer. Veo is Google DeepMind’s video generation model, which allows users to create AI-generated backgrounds and video clips for Shorts. Previously, YouTube Shorts’ Dream Screen option ran on Veo, but the introduction of Veo 3 will improve the video quality of these backgrounds and give users the option of incorporating audio.
