Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has handily summarised the latter’s Q4 results in a blog post this week, and right near the top is an interesting figure: YouTube’s annual revenues surpassed $60 billion across ads and subscriptions.
Looking deeper into the fiscal results themselves, YouTube ads brought in $11.38 billion in the last quarter, compared to $10.47 billion in last year’s report. Anecdotally, I can well believe this figure, as YouTube’s ad frequency ramped up at such a rate towards the end of 2025 that I finally caved and bought a YouTube Premium subscription myself.
On the surface, YouTube’s revenue figure seems impressive—but its viewing figures are even more so. According to CEO Neal Mohan in his 2026 YouTube community letter, YouTube Shorts alone average out to 200 billion daily views. The YouTube head honcho also reports that YouTube has been “#1 in streaming watchtime in the U.S. for nearly three years”, according to Nielsen’s The Gauge report.
It’s difficult to get reliable data on YouTube’s usage figures overall, but it’s said to have between 2.5 and 2.7 billion monthly active users worldwide as of 2025, with well over 1 billion hours of video content consumed daily, and over 20 million videos uploaded on average per day. If those figures are even close to accurate, that’s an astonishing amount of data to handle—even for a cloud behemoth like Google with its own vast server infrastructure to lean on.
Likewise, it’s very difficult to get a bead on exactly how much YouTube costs to run. But once creator monetisation payments, employee costs, and server maintenance are brought into the equation, it must be a pretty penny. Alphabet’s Q4 financial report says that the revenue of Google Services in total was $95.86 billion, with its operating income reported as $40.132 billion, so that’s $55.73 billion spent on servicing costs in the last quarter alone.
Of course, that’s including Google’s vast services infrastructure overall, not just YouTube. Still, it does make me wonder whether YouTube in and of itself is as profitable as its parent company hopes it would be, despite the impressive revenue figure. It’s certainly more than Netflix, though, which reported $45.18 billion of total annual revenue earlier this year—along with operating expenses of $31.85 billion.
The ad strategy I (and many others) have observed in recent months certainly seems to suggest that YouTube is doubling down on its income potential, whether that’s advertising or pushing people towards its paid premium services, or a combination of the two. It’s remarkably good at noticing adblockers these days, too, which feels like an escalation of its previous, adblock-hating ways.
It’s all about money at the end of the day. Still, with so many eyeballs on its videos, and so many excellent (and many dubious) creators using its platform, I will admit that YouTube Premium has finally got me to open my moth-ridden wallet and cough up. What can I say, I like a bit of ad-free YouTube before bedtime. Don’t we all?
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