YouTube is a big deal in the entertainment and tech industry. But just how much of a success story has it been for Google, who first acquired the platform for $1.65 million back in 2006? That’s been a mystery that the company has never expanded upon as it kept the financial successes of YouTube under wraps until recently when Alphabet released its fourth-quarter earnings report from last year to investors.
The report reveals that in the last three months of the year along, YouTube generated nearly $5 billion in ad revenue with the company revealing that YouTube generated around $15 billion in total to the company’s revenues in the past year which equates to around 10 percent of the company’s global revenue. It’s not all just ad-generated content though as the company also reported that they have over 20 million premium subscribers who have signed up for an ad-free service.
So, while we know Google as a big search engine company and the markers of the Android and Chrome platforms, it’s clear that YouTube remains a massive part of the business and even though the company is, like its competitors, trying to branch out in other directions like Cloud service and hardware, YouTube on its own remains a massive earner that far outweighs those two business with Google Cloud only bringing in $2.6 billion for the quarter and the hardware division only $2 billion on total for the year.
As for Android, while Google didn’t go into as much detail how much the app store brought into the business this past year, the company has paid as much as $80 billion out to app developers over the years, revealing that this alone is a massive part of the business, even if the company only gets a fraction of that amount.
So, Google is successfully branching out into a lot of technologies and platforms to diversify itself outside of just being a big search engine, but ads remain a large part of its revenue with Google search still bring in a large part of the ad revenue outside of the massive amount of money YouTube is bringing in as well. All these numbers ultimately prove is that Alphabet is a tech company that despite some tough times of late, remains a massive player in the tech and entertainment space and will probably be for many years to come.
Last Updated: February 4, 2020
