For more than forty years, the argument around Welsh-language broadcasting has largely been about institutions.
How much money should S4C receive? How many programmes should it commission? How many hours should be broadcast? How should Welsh-language television compete with the BBC, ITV, Netflix and the seemingly endless supply of English-language content now available?
Those remain important questions.
But there is another question we urgently need to start asking.
Where are the Welsh-speaking YouTubers?
Not simply people occasionally uploading videos in Welsh. I mean professional, sustainable, recognisable Welsh-language creators capable of building audiences of tens or hundreds of thousands of people around comedy, gaming, food, sport, politics, technology, parenting, fashion, music, cars, history, travel or just their own personalities.
Because that is increasingly where the battle for attention is being fought.
And at the moment, English is winning it by default.
YouTube isn’t really YouTube anymore
It is easy for people who grew up with television to think of YouTube as somewhere teenagers watch clips on their phones.
That is increasingly outdated.
Ofcom reported this summer that average YouTube viewing in UK homes reached 41 minutes per person per day during 2025. More significantly, the amount watched through actual television sets has doubled since 2022, from nine minutes a day to 19 minutes.
YouTube is becoming a television platform.
For children, the transformation is even further advanced. British children aged 4 to 15 watched an average of 7 hours and 7 minutes of YouTube every week in 2025, an 8% increase in a year. Video-sharing platforms collectively now account for the largest proportion of children’s in-home video viewing.
That matters enormously for Welsh.
The Welsh Government’s Cymraeg 2050 strategy, which was launched under Welsh Labour in what feels like an age ago in 2017, doesn’t simply aim to create one million people who can speak Welsh. Its second major objective is to double the proportion of people who actually use Welsh every day.
Those are two very different challenges.
Schools can help create Welsh speakers.
But you cannot create habitual Welsh speakers without giving them places and spaces in which they actually can and want to use the language.
Increasingly, one of those places is YouTube.
Six hours online — mostly in English
The recently published report of the Commission for Welsh-speaking Communities makes this point remarkably clearly.
It notes research suggesting 18 to 24-year-olds spend an average six hours and one minute online every day and argues that this should represent an enormous opportunity for Welsh.
The problem is that much of that online life takes place in English.
The Commission goes further. It identifies a shortage of Welsh-language content on social platforms, argues that investment in digital content production can provide both employment and opportunities to use Welsh, and specifically highlights the potential role of digital influencers.
It even points towards Catalonia, where government support has been used to encourage influencers creating Catalan-language content.
That is significant.
We have spent decades thinking about Welsh-language infrastructure as schools, community centres, television studios and workplaces.
Perhaps a YouTube channel with 150,000 subscribers should now be considered Welsh-language infrastructure too.
The good news: we know Welsh content can work
There is already substantial evidence of demand.
S4C revealed in April that viewers had watched 1.1 million hours of its content on YouTube during the previous year, as it announced a new strategic partnership with YouTube and a move towards commissioning more YouTube-first material.
S4C’s wider digital numbers are moving strongly too. Its latest annual results showed monthly viewing across YouTube, Clic and iPlayer increasing 22%, while monthly social-media impressions increased 83% to 35.6 million.
I was the author of S4C’s first digital strategy during my time as head of Digital at the broadcaster between 2012 and 2016.
Pump, which I commissioned and evolved into Hansh following my departure, was an early attempt to stop expecting younger audiences to come to a television channel and instead put Welsh-language content into the places where young people were already spending their time.
But there is another stage we now need to reach.
Because succeeding on YouTube isn’t simply about broadcasters putting television content onto YouTube.
I made a conscious decision not to brand that early content as S4C; it was important people saw it as Welsh language content being shared and viewed online.
Success is about creators.
The creator gap
Research using Tubular Labs data in the US found something extraordinary in 2025.
More than 95% of YouTube views were going to creator-led content rather than media companies.
It is US rather than Welsh data, and definitions vary, so we shouldn’t pretend precisely the same percentage applies here.
But the overall message is difficult to ignore.
YouTube’s ecosystem is overwhelmingly creator-led.
MrBeast isn’t a television channel.
The Sidemen aren’t a broadcaster.
Successful gaming channels, food channels, technology reviewers, comedians, podcasters and commentators frequently begin with an individual and an idea.
Some eventually grow into production businesses employing dozens of people. Their videos can have production values every bit as sophisticated as television.
But audiences still perceive themselves as following people, not institutions.
And that difference matters.
Traditional television commissions programmes.
YouTube builds relationships.
Someone might watch a six-part television series because they like the programme. Someone might watch hundreds of videos over five years because they like the person making them.
For a minority language like Cymraeg, that relationship is extraordinarily valuable.
Imagine a Welsh-speaking teenager following a gaming creator who uploads three times a week. Welsh isn’t being presented as something that happens during a Welsh lesson or something consciously consumed because it is Welsh-language content.
It’s simply the language in which something they already love happens.
That is language normalisation.
Stop making Welsh the subject
One of the traps minority-language media can fall into is thinking Welsh-language content has to be about Wales or about Welsh.
It doesn’t.
We need videos reviewing this years iPhone in Welsh.
Someone rebuilding an old Ford Escort in Welsh.
Welsh-language Minecraft.
Make-up tutorials.
Football analysis.
Weight training.
Food.
Comedy.
Personal finance.
Science.
Parenting.
Artificial intelligence.
History.
Relationships.
Film reviews.
Politics.
The subject doesn’t have to be Welsh.
The experience needs to be available through Welsh.
If we genuinely want Welsh to be an everyday language, it needs to perform the everyday functions English already performs effortlessly.
And that means backing hundreds of different voices rather than expecting a handful of commissioners to predict everything an audience might want.
Invest in people, not individual videos
This requires a different funding model.
Traditional commissioning tends to fund a product: six episodes, ten films, a documentary, a series.
Creator development requires investment over time.
Give promising creators enough financial security to publish consistently for two or three years. Help them with cameras, editing, thumbnails, copyright, analytics and audience development. Give them access to professional producers when they need them. Help them develop commercial partnerships and understand how to build businesses around their audiences.
But critically, allow the creator to remain the creator.
Don’t turn them into presenters of institutional content.
Don’t require every video to carry the fingerprints of a public funding initiative.
And don’t measure success solely by whether every individual video achieves enormous viewing figures.
Measure subscribers. Returning viewers. Watch time. Engagement. Younger audiences. The amount of Welsh consumed. Whether audiences begin voluntarily interacting with one another in Welsh.
Most importantly, measure whether creators become financially sustainable.
The ultimate success of a Welsh creator fund shouldn’t be that somebody receives public funding forever.
It should be that, five years later, they no longer need it.
Think of it as cultural venture capital
There is an economic argument here as well as a linguistic one.
A successful Welsh YouTube creator isn’t merely producing cultural content.
They are potentially creating an exportable digital business.
Unlike traditional broadcasting, geography barely matters. A creator based in Caernarfon, Carmarthen, Aberystwyth or the Rhondda can reach Welsh speakers in Cardiff, London, and the global Welsh diaspora instantly.
Subtitles and automated translation increasingly mean Welsh-language creators can potentially reach audiences who don’t speak Welsh at all.
The language therefore stops being a limitation on the addressable market and can instead become part of the creator’s distinctive identity.
Wales could reasonably establish a Welsh Creator Fund, offering perhaps 50 to 100 emerging creators a mixture of grants, training, production support and business development.
Some would fail.
That is perfectly acceptable.
Others might become significant Welsh media brands.
One or two might become enormous.
That is how creative ecosystems work.
Broadcasting still matters
None of this is an argument against S4C.
Quite the opposite.
S4C could sit at the centre of this ecosystem, providing expertise, commissioning, promotion and pathways between creator-led media and traditional television.
Imagine a Welsh comedian building 200,000 followers independently before developing a television sitcom.
A history creator turning a successful YouTube format into an S4C series.
A young political commentator moving between YouTube, podcasts and broadcast election coverage.
Or a Welsh cook developing an audience following before creating a television format that could itself be exported. Chris “Flamebaster” Roberts grew his brand online before appearing on S4C and then the BBC.
Instead of digital being the promotional department for television, television becomes one possible destination for successful digital ideas.
That reverses the traditional relationship.
And that is where broadcasting is heading anyway.
A language has to exist where life happens
The future of Welsh will not ultimately be determined by how many people can tick a box saying they are capable of speaking it.
It will depend on whether they choose to.
Whether Welsh is the language of friendships.
Work.
Comedy.
Gaming.
Politics.
Music.
Football.
Internet arguments.
Podcasts.
YouTube.
Everything.
For the past forty years Wales successfully built institutions capable of ensuring Welsh had a place in the broadcasting age.
The next challenge is ensuring it has a place in the creator age.
We should continue investing in programmes.
We should continue investing in broadcasters.
But perhaps one of the most important investments Wales could now make in the future of its language is much simpler.
Find talented Welsh-speaking people with something interesting to say, give them the tools and time to find an audience — and get out of their way.