YouTube’s subscriptions business is ‘growing faster than ads’
Skip to contentHome»News»YouTube’s subscriptions business is ‘growing faster than ads’YouTube and Google’s parent company Alphabet haspublished its financial results for the second quarter of 2026, including. . .
Skip to contentHome»News»YouTube’s subscriptions business is ‘growing faster than ads’YouTube and Google’s parent company Alphabet haspublished its financial results for the second quarter of 2026, including the latest figures for YouTube’s advertising business. YouTube ads generated $11. 06bn of revenue for Alphabet last quarter. That’s up 12. 9% year-on-year. What about YouTube Music? There was an interesting comment from Alphabet SVP and chief business officer Philipp Schindlerduring the company’s earnings callafter the results announcement. “YouTube’s subscription business, which thrives across living room screens, is growing faster than ads, particularly driven by YouTube Music and Premium,” said Schindler. SVP and chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi later repeated that data-point. “Subscription, platforms and devices revenues increased 15% this quarter to $12. 9 billion due to strong growth in both YouTube subscriptions, particularly YouTube Music and Premium, and Google One, which was driven by demand for AI plans,” said Ashkenazi. Wereported on YouTube’s subscriptions businessin February this year, when Alphabet revealed that YouTube made $40. 37bn from ads in 2025, with subscriptions taking its total revenues to more than $60bn. In other words, subscriptions were a $20b-ish business for YouTube in 2025 – a third of its overall revenues. Ads may still be the dominant business model for YouTube, but the balance is tilting a little. Other notes of interest from Alphabet’s financials concern AI. Its Gemini app now has 950 million monthly active users, with daily active users having “tripled in the last year”. Meanwhile, the ‘AI mode’ in Google’s search engine now has more than one billion monthly active users, with CEO Sundar Pichai pushing back against critics of it by noting that “we’re now sending billions of clicks to websites every week through AI features in Search”.