Google parent Alphabet earns $100 billion in revenue; YouTube ad sales jump during Q3

YouTube on a phone and computer monitor. — (Photo by Natalie Voy)

Key Points

YouTube earned more than $10.2 billion in advertising revenue during Q3, nearly 10 percent of Alphabet’s overall revenue for the period.
Subscriptions attributed to YouTube Premium, YouTube TV and YouTube Music also helped boost earnings.
YouTube is launching a “Second Chance” program that will give conspiracy theorists and other problematic content creators a path to return to the app.
Read more coverage of Q3 2025 media earnings

YouTube’s subscription and advertising business helped generate a staggering amount of revenue for parent company Alphabet during the third quarter (Q3) of the year, driven primarily by higher interest in YouTube Premium and YouTube TV, the company said on Wednesday.

Revenue attributed to YouTube’s advertising business alone clocked in at nearly $10.3 billion, up more than 15 percent when evaluated against the same time period last year, and accounting for more than 10 percent of Alphabet’s $102.4 billion in Q3 revenue.

On a sequential basis, YouTube’s advertising revenue was 5 percent higher compared to the $9.8 billion the platform earned during Q2.

Class C shares of Alphabet were up more than 2.5 percent in after-hours trading.

Stock Price

YouTube consistently ranks as the world’s most-popular streaming video platform, second only to ByteDance-owned TikTok. In the United States, YouTube routinely tops the list of streaming apps measured by Nielsen each month, though the measurement company is often light on details about what people are watching.

That information tends to matter little to those on Wall Street, who view YouTube as a cash machine that seems to keep printing money every quarter. Streamers love it, nothing else seems to be able to topple it and the platform is disrupting almost every corner of the media and entertainment industry.

Alphabet doesn’t disclose the number of people who are paying for a subscription to YouTube or its ancillary products, like the cable alternative YouTube TV or streaming music platform YouTube Music. Instead, it rolls subscriber data into a broader metric that also includes other services like Google One. To that end, Google says more than 300 million customers around the world are paying for a subscription on a regular basis. Many have access to premium features on YouTube, the company affirmed.

“Alphabet had a terrific quarter, with double-digit growth across every major part of our business,” Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet and Google, said in a statement accompanying the earnings report.

Alphabet doesn’t want the YouTube gravy train to pull out of the station anytime soon: On Wednesday, the company affirmed it is restructuring parts of its video business to strengthen its position across subscription and creator-led ecosystems.

To that end, long-time YouTube executive Christian Oestlien has been tapped to lead a new Subscriptions Product division that will include YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, YouTube Primetime Channels, YouTube Music and platforms and services coming down the road. Johanna Voolich, formerly the Chief Product Officer, will lead a new unit called Viewer Products, the company affirmed. Alphabet is seeking a third executive to lead a new Creator & Community Products team, which will be focused on nurturing its relationships with independent content producers and their fans.

The reorganization comes as YouTube continues to balance its dual focus on expanding subscription offerings and maintaining advertiser appeal. Analysts have noted that YouTube’s integration of short-form video through Shorts and its push into connected television have both contributed to sustained revenue growth. (Shorts works similar to Instagram Reels or the short-form videos found on TikTok.)

YouTube is also trying to restore some goodwill that was lost with certain creators who were banned after promoting political and health conspiracy theories on its platform a few years ago. At the time, those creators were booted off the app out of safety concerns; now, with some of those conspirators holding lucrative positions in the Trump administration, Alphabet and YouTube have done an about-face, extending an olive branch to those influencers under the guise of free expression.

A program called “Second Chance” will deliver just that — a second chance for people banned from the platform to return, if they want. Some have absconded for good, taking their audiences to other platforms like Rumble and Truth Social, while others have expressed a willingness to rejoin the largest and most-influential streaming platform on the planet.