The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard Trial is Fueling a YouTube Boom For News Outlets

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The blockbuster defamation trial between actors and ex-spouses Johnny Depp and Amber Heard has been impossible to ignore.

The celebrity trial, which began on April 12, has inspired an endless font of content, from viral TikTok trends to memes. And thanks to the cameras in the courtroom, it has led to a veritable boom in audiences for news outlets streaming the trial on YouTube and other platforms.

Rachel Stockman, president of live trial network Law&Crime, views the boom as an indicator that news consumption has changed, especially for high-profile trials such as this one. (Mediaite and Law&Crime are both owned by Abrams Media).

“People are really not watching this on traditional linear channels — they’re consuming it via social media, via live streams on YouTube, via live streams on Twitter,” Stockman said in an interview with Mediaite. She noted the network has also seen its audience grow on Twitch.

The trial has boosted Law&Crime’s YouTube page past its previous viewership records: The network has reached 620,488,854 million total viewers on content related to the trial, and its channel has gained more than one million subscribers in less than one month.

Downloads for the Law&Crime app have also increased by ten-fold and viewership on the app is now 50 times higher than when the trial began, the network told Mediaite.

Depp’s testimony, which occurred before Heard took the stand, had a peak of 587,000 live concurrent viewers on Law&Crime’s stream, while more than one million concurrent viewers watched Heard testify live.

Several Law&Crime streams also earned a total of well over 10 million views. The May 18 stream, for example, in which several of Heard’s acquaintances testified, including her sister, racked up more than 14 million views total.

Those numbers put the stream in the orbit of cable news outlets, which have not been prioritizing trial coverage. Fox News saw an average of 1.93 million viewers on May 18, while MSNBC averaged 763,000 and CNN 509,000.

While some cable news hosts have highlighted and discussed bombshell moments, networks have not been airing a consistent live feed of the trial, making YouTube and streaming platforms the public’s primary look into the courtroom.

In addition to Law&Crime, outlets that don’t generally focus on courtroom dramas have similarly secured impressive numbers on their live streams.

CBS News reached a large audience across Depp’s four-day stretch on the stand: 400,00 views total on their April 19 stream of the trial, more than 1 million on April 20, 840,000 on April 21, and more than 3 million on April 25.

Entertainment Tonight’s video of the May 18 testimony reached just over 2.1 million views, while the stream of Heard’s last day on the stand racked up more than 2.5 million views total.

As of writing, nearly 860,000 people were watching the trial on Law&Crime’s YouTube live stream, while CBS News had roughly 40,000 eyes on their stream, 97,516 were watching on Fox’s LiveNOW stream, 16,734 were tuned in to NBC News, almost 67,000 on Entertainment Tonight, 7,053 on E!, 4,672 on Court TV, and nearly 2,000 were on the Yahoo Finance channel’s stream.

NBC, Fox, Sky News, and other outlets have been streaming the trial in full, while People’s YouTube channel now has a playlist dedicated to live streams, which currently only includes content from the Depp vs. Heard trial.

News and media outlets are not the only channels with a newfound focus on courtroom content, as independent YouTube and TikTok creators have amassed large audiences covering Depp vs. Heard.

One 15-year-old YouTuber is now drawing tens of millions of views after pivoting to Depp-Heard content.

“I saw this Amber Heard trial, and I saw how people were blowing up off it, so I decided, ‘You know what, I can probably try this, too,’” the YouTuber told NBC News. “I just started uploading on it, and it worked.”

Alice Parkes, a professional illustrator based in Wales, went from having roughly 50 followers on her TikTok account to nearly 170,000 as she began to create and share animations to play over audio from the actual trial.

Public interest in courtroom dramas is nothing new (see: O.J. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial, which was televised to a fascinated national audience by Court TV and other news outlets.)

But the venue for where people are getting their coverage of major celebrity trials has shifted from linear networks to platforms like YouTube and social media apps like TikTok. Whether it’s raw live footage streamed on YouTube or even viral TikTok videos, the trial’s popularity online points to a change in how the public consumes live news.

“I’m very cognizant of the change of consumption and behavior of this particular trial,” Stockman told Mediaite. “I really do see this as a big shift in some ways in terms of consumption of trials specifically, but perhaps even of other big live news events as well.”