What Watching 25+ Hours a Week of YouTube Gets Me

I don’t own a television these days and I boast about it on occasion to any wandering ear that is willing to hear it.

But I do watch YouTube. Alot. And I was completely unaware of the fact, up until last week when I stumbled upon the “time watched” graph tucked away in the Settings menu. I highly recommend you check your own histogram as well. What I saw was, to be perfectly honest, a little surprising and a little embarrassing.

It wasn’t that the number was comically high. I wasn’t spending 12 hours a day watching a constant stream of auto-played videos of top 10 lists and people watching people react to being watched, or whatever the trend is these days.

But it was embarrassing because my whole “I don’t watch TV” thing became meaningless. Because apparently I do watch television, but nobody told me.

In total I was averaging about 3.5 hours of watch time each and every day, with a slight uptick on Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s clocking around 4 to 4.5 hours. I’m assuming that’s when content creators post their best content.

Hear me out, 3.5 hours isn’t high. It’s probably slightly less than when I was a kid and spent the first 2 hours after school watching cartoons and another 3 hours at night watching everything else. Not to mention the weekly 2-hour high…