Britons watched YouTube on average for 51 minutes a day in 2025 on smartphones, tablets and PCs, regulator Ofcom said, noting that services from its owner Alphabet and from Meta account for more than half of all time spent online.

According to a Reuters report from London yesterday, British adults spend an average of four and a half hours online a day, Ofcom said in the Online Nation 2025 report, up 10 minutes on last year.

YouTube was Alphabet’s most popular service in Britain, used by 94 percent of adult internet users in May 2025, according to Ofcom, beating Google Search, which was used by 82 percent of online adults.

The combination of Facebook and Messenger remained the most widely used Meta-owned service, used by 93 percent of online adults, the report said, while WhatsApp was used by 90 percent.

The growing popularity of YouTube shows how the media landscape is rapidly changing in Britain, with traditional linear broadcasters losing audience share to social media sites dominated by Alphabet and Meta.

Pay-TV group Sky, owned by Comcast, last month said it was in talks to buy ITV, Britain’s biggest free-to-air commercial broadcaster. Former ITV chairman Peter Bazalgette said when the talks were announced that regulators needed to redefine the ad market to take account of competing digital services, such as YouTube.

Meanwhile, the Ofcom report, accessed by Indianbroadcastingworld.com, also dwelt on the rising use of artificial intelligence, which is changing the UK’s search experience. About 30 percent of searches now show AI overviews, and more than half (53 percent) of adults say they see these summaries often. In most cases, they aren’t seeking these but finding them now included by their search services.

Google Search is used by four in five (82 percent) adults. It is by far the most used search service in the UK, with 3 billion searches a month.

Generative AI services are gaining traction, with more people actively seeking them out. ChatGPT had 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million in the same period of 2024.

Fewer adults feel freer to be themselves online than offline this year (25 percent, down from 30 percent last year), and only 35 percent feel they can share opinions more easily online than offline.

What are the UK’s children doing online? Social media, schoolwork and spending regrets. Younger Gen Z and the eldest Gen Alphas are mobile-first, video-native internet users. Children aged 8–14 spend almost three hours online daily, rising to four hours for 13–14-year-olds and about two hours for 8–9-year-olds. This only counts time on smartphones, tablets, laptops and computers and not games consoles.

Adults are less positive about the impact of the internet. This year, only a third of adults (33 percent) said they feel the internet is good for society (down from 40 percent last year), the Ofcom report  said.