News this week from the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB) that YouTube has surpassed the BBC in viewing share has been widely framed as a tipping point. Some read it as a final nail in the future of public service broadcasting in a platform-led age.

But having spent ten years as a BBC journalist, another decade as a freelance content producer and academic, as well as the past five years as an Ofcom Content Board member, my instinct at times like this is to pause.

Audience measurement in a fragmented media landscape is complex. Anyone working in the industry knows that figures like those contained in this latest report from Barb – the independent UK body that measures and provides audience data for TV and video – have long been treated with caution. They capture something meaningful, but not the whole picture.

It’s important to be transparent about how Barb arrives at its numbers. Viewing is captured through two main methods: people-based data from the Barb panel; and device-based census data for online TV viewing. Both are well-established approaches, but both are proxies. They rely on standard assumptions about attention and behaviour in a world where people are increasingly watching across multiple platforms at the same time.

One television or “a view” doesn’t necessarily mean one viewer. A clip playing on a second screen doesn’t........

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