YouTube‘s advertising business is exploding. Recently, Alphabet reported its Q1 2021 results, which showed that YouTube brought in $6 billion in Ad revenue for the period, up 49% year-on-year. That’s a huge result, which now puts YouTube on pace to beat digital video rival Netflix in annual earnings.
In simple terms, YouTube is now generating an average of over $2 billion every month from ads – and that it’s potentially on course to generate somewhere near to $30 billion across the course of this year. It’s Ad revenues are now growing so fast, the $6.005 billion generated in Q1 2021 was roughly double the size of Ad revenues two years prior, in Q1 2019 ($3.025 billion).
YouTube’s revenues these days aren’t just derived from ads, of course. The platform also has a significant subscription business, which includes those subscribing to its music service, YT Music, and its YouTube Premium tier. YouTube’s Global Head of Music, Lyor Cohen, confirmed in November that more than 2 billion logged-in users were now playing music on the service every month.