Sergio Pizzolante

YouTube just crossed $60B in revenue for 2025. $40B from ads. $20B from subscriptions. Both numbers are growing double digits. The math here tells you everything about how Google actually views its users. 2.7 billion people use YouTube every month. 125 million pay for Premium. That’s 4.6% of the user base generating a third of total revenue. Google’s own executives said on their Q4 earnings call that a Premium subscriber generates “meaningfully higher gross profit” than an ad-supported user. So YouTube’s real optimization function is straightforward: make the ad experience painful enough that the 4.6% who can afford $14/month convert to Premium, while keeping it tolerable enough that the other 95.4% still watch long enough for advertisers to extract value. This is a toll booth that charges both directions. Advertisers pay to get in front of you. You pay to make them go away. And YouTube takes a cut of both transactions on the same piece of content, from the same viewer session, off the same infrastructure. The subscription business alone is now generating ~$20B annually across Premium, YouTube Music, and YouTube TV. That’s bigger than Spotify’s entire revenue. And it grew 25% year over year, adding roughly 2 million new paying subscribers per month through 2024. The advertisers aren’t getting scammed either. YouTube controls 12.4% of total TV viewing time in the US. Shorts pulls 70 billion daily views. The ad side grew 9% to $40B. Both sides of the market are expanding because YouTube is the only platform where the product being sold to advertisers (your attention) is the same product being sold back to you (your attention, uninterrupted). That’s a $60B business built on one insight: attention is the only asset you can sell twice.