YouTube’s $60bn revenue revealed amid paid subscriber push

Google has revealed YouTube brought in more than $60bn (£44bn) in revenue in 2025 as the firm targets getting more subscribers.

The figure, which totals the money generated through advertising on YouTube as well as paid subscriptions, far surpasses streaming rival Netflix’s $45bn revenue.

It appears to be the first time Google has individually highlighted its video platform’s yearly revenue since acquiring it in 2006.

Midia Research senior analyst Hanna Kahlert said while it was a big announcement, it was “perhaps not a surprising one” - with the platform becoming “almost infrastructural for digital natives”.

“YouTube is one of – if not the – most-used of all digital offerings, with over 70% of international consumers using it weekly, and over 50% using it daily,” she told the BBC, citing Midia consumer survey data.

Kahlert said the different ways the platform makes money - such as through adverts, or charging a monthly subscription to remove them - means it can “capitalise well” on its large audience.

While YouTube’s global ad revenue in the last three months of 2025 fell below Wall Street expectations at $11.38bn (£8.37bn), Google boss Sundar Pichai highlighted YouTube’s broader growth as part of a “fantastic year” for the company.

He said YouTube Premium - its service letting users pay to remove ads between videos, or songs on its music service - had helped boost paid subscriptions across Google consumer services to more than 325 million in 2025 overall.

The company has not released YouTube’s own subscriber numbers.

But Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, told investors on an earnings call on Wednesday YouTube was seeing “strong traction” in subscriptions.

He said it has been “innovating to meet consumers where they are” with new, cheaper YouTube TV and Premium tiers.

The firm has also been trying to find more ways to get people to subscribe - such as only allowing Premium users to play videos in the background on smartphones.

At the same time, Shorts, YouTube’s TikTok-style short videos, was also said to be averaging more than 200 billion daily views.

‘Not just cat videos anymore’

As it celebrated its 20th birthday last year, YouTube swelled to become the second most-watched media service in the UK after the BBC, according to Ofcom.

Ofcom later found the platform was used by 94% of UK adult internet users, with time spent on it growing to reach an average of 51 minutes a day per person.

The UK’s public service broadcaster recently announced plans to make shows for YouTube in a landmark deal.

YouTube’s $60bn revenue in 2025 meanwhile beat that of rival Netflix - though Forrester analyst Mike Proulx said it was not an “apples-to-apples comparison”.

“The lion’s share of YouTube’s content is user-generated versus ‘Hollywood’-generated,” he said.

But he said “the competitive lines are blurring”, with Disney+ partnering with OpenAI on short-form user created content, while YouTube will host the Oscars from 2029.

“YouTube is not just cat videos anymore,” Netflix boss Ted Sarandos told US lawmakers in a Senate hearing on Tuesday about its plans to buy Warner Bros.

“YouTube is TV”.

Netflix has recently sought to ink deals with content creators, including popular YouTubers, in an effort to boost its own offerings.

But some creators, including the world’s biggest MrBeast, have voiced concern about the impact of AI.

The rise of tools like Google’s AI Overviews, its AI-generated summaries of search results, have been linked by some to dips in traffic to their videos, sites and content.

The European Commission launched an investigation in December to examine the impact of Google’s AI summaries on content creators and web publishers.

The UK’s markets regulator has since proposed measures to give publishers more controls over the appearance of their work in Google’s AI summaries and products.

Google said it believed it could “find a path forward that provides even more choice to website owners and publishers”.

But the company pledged in its latest results to plough even more money into AI - something big tech bosses say they will spend eye-watering sums on this year.

Source: BBC

--Agencies