Tube Trends: How TurboTax Owns Tax Season On YouTube

Apr 23

For TurboTax, its peak season has ballooned in recent years from the immediate lead-up to April 15 to what’s become a several-month campaign to capture the attention (and business) of U.S. taxpayers.

TurboTax’s extended ad season started in earnest back in 2024, when the brand started blitzing TV with spots at the start of football season in advance of 2025’s filing deadline. And since then, it’s also moved to YouTube, where TurboTax has been one of the most visible brands on the platform since the start of the year.

Turbo-Charged Reach, Watch-Time On YouTube

Data from Tubular Labs shows that TurboTax has more U.S. watch-time on YouTube than any other U.S. brand from January through March, at 505.7 million minutes — 65 million more than Booking.com at No. 2. TurboTax’s YouTube videos have also reached over 100 million unique U.S. viewers for the last three months: 148.8 million in January, 119.6 million in February and 108.1 million in March. Each of those were among the top three among all brands during those months.

Major competitors like H&R Block and TaxSlayer (among others) are not particularly close when it comes to reach or watch-time — TurboTax topped H&R Block’s March YouTube minutes watched by nearly 19x alone — allowing TurboTax to largely own the digital conversation around tax season.

TurboTax also tailored its focus for YouTube videos on Millennials and Gen Z, leaning on messages around always-on help, filing with confidence and careers that lean more creative and/or independent (thus requiring more work around tax season).

Sponsored Video Success

Since the start of the year, TurboTax is the No. 2 U.S. brand by sponsored YouTube video views, according to data from Tubular.

The brand has partnered on 57 videos, totalling 338 million views across a variety of different creators in different content genres.

With one Anwar Jibawi video alone, the brand (and creator) hit 55.5 million views. TurboTax also partnered with big creators like HYPEBEAST, New Heights, Not Gonna Lie, Just Women’s Sports, Overtime and more to score contextual engagement and exposure to those highly engaged audiences.

During the same stretch last year, TurboTax may have sponsored more videos — 98 — in the lead-up to tax season. But the brand also saw far fewer views in that stretch, with just 98.1 million, according to Tubular. Some of those creators (including New Heights) were repeated year-over-year, though. This time around, it’s likely TurboTax spent more money promoting while ALSO opting with a greater variety of creators and landing a few more popular partners.

TurboTax Takeaways?

While TurboTax will be the only ones to truly understand the impact of all of these efforts on their business, there are still some key takeaways for other tax brands, or any other advertiser, to digest here.

TurboTax has undergone a several-year build to grow its footprint during tax season and become one of TV’s most visible brands throughout Q1 across both traditional TV and social video. Its 2026 efforts have pushed that idea even more, while becoming further entrenched in social video and a younger ad aesthetic has allowed it to position itself well with that audience as they look for help in an increasingly complicated tax envronment.

For tax brands, it’s easy to look up at what TurboTax has done and see an insurmountable hill on both TV and social video. But even without the ad spend, those brands can still find niche partnership opportunities around YouTube and other video platforms.

Outside of taxes, other brands can put a similar emphasis on a specific audience (younger poeple) through ads, and find ways to work directly with creators to get messaging in front of those viewers.