YouTube Livestream Advertising: What Works

Contents

YouTube livestream advertising sounds like it should be the easy one. YouTube is the largest video platform in the world, it has a mature ad business, and plenty of creators go live there. In practice it is the hardest of the three livestream platforms to buy creator-side inventory on, and our own numbers show why.

What our delivery split actually looks like

Across every external campaign we have delivered, 28,844 display placements went out on Twitch, 117 on Kick and 15 on YouTube. That is not a ranking of the platforms by size. It is a ranking by how much live creator inventory each one makes reachable.

We publish that number because it is the opposite of a sales pitch. If someone tells you they can deliver a creator campaign across YouTube Live at Twitch-like volume, ask them for their platform split.

Why live is different from video on demand

YouTube's own ad products are excellent, and they are built around video on demand. A pre-roll on a finished video is a solved problem. A live broadcast is not a file with an ad break in it — it is a session, and the moment to place something inside it exists for a few seconds and then does not.

On top of that, YouTube's live API gives far less signal to build on than Twitch's. Chat context is thinner, and reliably knowing a channel is live at all takes more work.

Where YouTube does earn its place

Two cases justify it. The first is a creator who genuinely simulcasts, where the YouTube half is incremental audience rather than a separate buy. The second is reach among viewers who simply do not use Twitch — that audience exists and is not small.

What YouTube is not, today, is the platform you build a livestream campaign's volume on. Treat it as the second channel of a campaign, not the first.

How to plan around it

Set your expected volume from Twitch, then treat YouTube and Kick as upside rather than as a third of the plan. Price the whole campaign on total delivered impressions, not on a per-platform promise nobody can keep.

And measure per platform rather than in aggregate. A campaign that looks fine overall can be entirely Twitch, which is a useful thing to know before you renew it.

For the platform comparison in full, see Twitch vs YouTube vs Kick. Kick specifically is covered in the Kick advertising guide, and the advertiser overview shows what is live right now.