Emilio GarciaManaging Partner, Boundify · Demand Gen Advisor

Is YouTube Underutilized?

19 Jun 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:07

In this commentary, Emilio Garcia argues that YouTube is widely misunderstood, emphasizing that it should be classified as a social media platform. He points out that when evaluated with audience‑location tools such as SparkToro, YouTube consistently appears as the top social media platform in many countries, often surpassing Facebook in popularity. This observation challenges the common perception that Facebook is the most popular social media site and highlights a gap in public awareness about YouTube’s role as a social platform.

Chapters

I think YouTube is a mostly misunderstood platform. To begin with, it's technically classified as a social media platform, which is funny because when you classify it that way, it is the most popular social media platform in the world, right? Is what you think. Well, the most social, the most popular social media platform is Facebook. Well, if you put YouTube there, it isn't. The— for most— and what I mean by that, let me correct this part. Maybe I'm wrong about the whole world. What I mean is that when you go to a tool like, let's say, SparkToro that we constantly talked about, a tool that allows you to evaluate where your audience is spending time based on their characteristics, YouTube shows up consistently on, on place number 1. And globally, for a lot of countries, it is technically the social media platform that is the most popular. So that's the first part that is missed from most people. That is, if you consider a social media platform, it's even more popular than Facebook.