A look into the YouTube economy in Brazil

With Covid-19 restrictions in place for a good part of 2020, Brazilians spent more time online, enhancing their social media presence — and logged more hours, many more hours, watching YouTube videos. Almost half of the Brazilian population (105 million, to be precise) accesses the giant video-sharing platform every month. Last year, a whopping 91 percent increased their time spent browsing videos, ComScore says. 

During the pandemic, Brazilian channels led the world in hours of live streaming, while the number of channels with at least 1 million subscribers jumped 30 percent to roughly 200,000.

YouTube has become so ubiquitous in Brazilian media consumption that Kantar Ibope, which measures audience numbers for advertisers, decided to count YouTube viewership, alongside television, in its ratings calculations. 

This week, the Alphabet-owned giant revealed with much fanfare that the “YouTube economy” in Brazil, which is to say, the money raised by content producers using it, topped BRL 3.4 billion (USD 640 million) in 2020 and accounts for 122,000 full-time jobs. The data comes from a study carried out by consultancy Oxford Economics and commissioned by YouTube itself.

“We estimated the direct GDP contribution of creative entrepreneurs by subtracting intermediate costs from revenue associated with YouTube activity (the ‘production’ approach). The direct GDP contribution...