YouTube Just Became Media's Biggest Content Spender. It Barely Makes Any Content.

For a hundred years, the biggest checkbook in entertainment belonged to whoever owned the most soundstages. This week, the accountants made it official: the biggest content spender in media is now a company that doesn't greenlight scripts, doesn't own a studio lot, and produces almost none of what it shows you.

KPMG released its second annual media content spend analysis on Wednesday, tracking where 13 of the industry's leading media and platform companies put their money. The headline number is healthy: an estimated $207 billion of annual content spend in 2025, up from $156 billion in 2021 — roughly 7% annualized growth. The entertainment industry is not shrinking.

What's shifting — fast — is who spends it, and on what.

YouTube Is Now the Industry's Biggest Spender

For the first time, YouTube ranks first in KPMG's 13-company analysis, with approximately $28 billion in content spend in 2025. That puts a video platform ahead of Comcast, Disney, Amazon, Netflix, Meta, and Paramount — every company that has ever been described as a "content powerhouse" now sits behind one that commissions almost nothing.

The mechanics matter more than the ranking. YouTube's content budget isn't a budget at all in the Hollywood sense. The bulk of it is revenue share: creators upload, audiences watch, advertisers pay, and YouTube remits a cut. There is no development slate, no greenlight committee, no write-down risk on a flop. The spend scales automatically with revenue — which means YouTube's "content costs" are structurally incapable of outrunning its income the way a studio's can.

Compare that with the model it just dethroned. A traditional studio or streamer commits capital before it knows whether anyone will watch. KPMG's data shows what that difference compounds into: while most traditional players' content budgets have flattened, the platform model just bought the top spot on the league table.

Where the Money Went: Creators and Sports

Two categories are absorbing nearly all of the industry's incremental dollars:

• Creator content reached about $46 billion in 2025, up 75% from 2021. User-generated content is now roughly 22% of all tracked content spend, up from 17%.
• Sports spend reached about $29 billion, up 57% from 2021 — now about 14% of the pie, driven by the scarcity value of live programming that advertisers can't get anywhere else.

Together, that's $75 billion a year flowing to formats that barely registered on media budgets a decade ago.

Traditional film, TV, and streaming content still grew in absolute terms — to roughly $132 billion — but its share of total spend fell from 71% in 2021 to 64% in 2025. The foundation of the industry is still scripted premium content. It's just a foundation that gets relatively smaller every year, while the floors above it fill up with NFL rights and creator deals. The blurring is visible at the company level too: Netflix signing YouTube-native creators and streaming live sports, studios courting podcasters, platforms buying music catalogs. Everyone is converging on the same fight — for the same finite hours of audience attention.

KPMG's framing is blunt: companies are no longer measuring content investment by prestige or volume, but by engagement — repeat visits, retention, advertising value, customer lifetime value. Content has stopped being the product. It's become the retention tool.

That reframing has a price tag attached, and it's the most interesting number in the report.

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