Recent Release | 08 Jun 2023

From opportunity to impact – Assessing the economic, societal, and cultural benefits of YouTube in Canada in 2022

Economic Consulting Team

Oxford Economics

This study presents an updated assessment of YouTube’s contribution to Canada’s GDP and employment, and its broader impact on society and culture.

Every day, YouTube helps Canadian users to learn new skills, connect with others, and enrich their lives. It also provides a platform for a diverse range of content creators to share their interests and passions with audiences within Canada and beyond, creating opportunities to build new careers and businesses. This supports substantial economic value for creators who receive income from the platform, for example as they are paid a share of the revenues from advertising placed alongside their videos. Creators may also earn revenues from other sources that are helped by their YouTube presence.

These revenue sources not only support jobs and income for the creators themselves, but also wider activity in their supply chains, and through workers’ spending. In total, our economic modeling suggests that YouTube’s creative ecosystem contributed more than $2 billion CAD to Canada’s economy in 2022 and supported more than 35,000 full-time equivalent jobs.

In this report we provide further details of our economic analysis, as well as the findings of wider survey research to investigate how YouTube can sustain careers for content creators; help businesses grow; build skills; amplify Canadian talent; and drive cultural diversity.

Alongside the findings from our economic modeling and surveys, the report presents a series of case studies to highlight the personal stories of successful Canadian content creators, ranging from financial literacy to cross-cultural cuisine.

To download the reports in English/French, please complete the form below.

The experts behind the research

Hamilton and Alice, members of the economic impact team, bring years of experience in quantitative economic analysis working with clients around the globe and across sectors to build models, forecast markets and evaluate interventions using state-of-the art techniques.

Hamilton Galloway

Head of Consultancy, Americas

Alice Gambarin

Lead Economist, Economic Impact

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