YouTube Revenue for Full-Year 2025 Topped $60 Billion, Making Video Platform Bigger Than Netflix

Giant YouTube revenue from advertising and subscriptions passed $60 billion last year while ad sales for the latest quarter rose 9% to $11.38 billion.

via: Variety

YouTube generated more than $60 billion in revenue for 2025, including both advertising and subscriptions, the first time parent company Alphabet has broken out total revenue for the platform.

That makes YouTube much larger than subscription-streaming leader Netflix, which reported $45.18 billion in revenue for full-year 2025. Indeed, the top-line number for YouTube was more than any other entertainment company except Disney ($95.7 billion in revenue for calendar year 2025).

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, said in prepared remarks that the company now has over 325 million paid subscriptions across consumer services, including YouTube Premium, YouTube TV and Google One.

Meanwhile, YouTube also notched its biggest-ever ad sales number to date for the fourth quarter of 2025. However, that ad haul came in below Wall Street forecasts.

In the last three months of the year, YouTube’s global ad revenue totaled $11.38 billion, a year-over-year increase of 8.7%, parent company Alphabet reported. Wall Street analysts on average forecast YouTube ad revenue coming in at $11.84 billion, per StreetAccount. On the brand advertising front, YouTube saw lower political ad spending in the most recent quarter compared with Q4 2024.

According to Pichai, the NFL saw its highest paid-subscriber total for the Sunday Ticket out-of-market package available through YouTube for the most recent season (but he didn’t say what that number was). In October 2025, viewers watched more than 700 million hours of podcasts on YouTube on TVs, up 70% year over year, he said.

Overall, Alphabet, also the parent of Google, posted Q4 revenue of $113.8 billion (up 18%) and net income of $34.5 billion (up 30%), or $2.82 per share. That handily topped analyst consensus estimates for $111.43 billion revenue and EPS of $2.63.

Alphabet is seeing its AI investments and infrastructure “drive revenue and growth across the board,” according to Pichai. He said that to “meet customer demand and capitalize on the growing opportunities we have ahead of us,” the company expects capital expenses to be $175 billion to $185 billion for 2026, which would be as much as double the $91.4 billion in capex for 2025.

During the quarter, YouTube inked a deal with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for exclusive global rights to the Oscars awards ceremony beginning in 2029 and running through 2033, nabbing the media rights from ABC. Last month the BBC announced a partnership with YouTube under which the U.K. broadcaster will produce original content for the platform and launch new YouTube channels aimed at children and young adults.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, in his 2026 letter to the community outlining the platform’s priorities for the year, touted new AI tools coming for creators and said more than 1 million channels used YouTube’s AI tools daily in December 2025. At the same time, the rise of artificial intelligence has raised concerns about “AI slop,” he said, and YouTube is working on “reducing the spread of low-quality, repetitive content.”

YouTube Shorts, the platform’s short-form video format, now averages 200 billion daily views, according to Mohan. This year, YouTube will integrate different formats, like image posts, directly into the Shorts feed. In addition, YouTube TV will soon launch a “fully customizable multiview” feature, letting users watch several live channels on one screen, and will roll out at least 10 lower-cost, genre-specific YouTube TV plans spanning sports, entertainment and news.