For decades, Disney, NBC, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery sat at the top of the advertising world. In 2025, a 21-year-old video platform built on cat videos and bedroom creators officially knocked them off.
YouTube’s total revenue across ads and subscriptions exceeded $60 billion in 2025, according to Alphabet’s official earnings release, making it larger than Netflix, which reported $45.18 billion for the full year.
A separate analysis by financial research firm MoffettNathanson found that YouTube’s advertising revenue alone surpassed the combined $37.8 billion ad haul from Disney, NBCU, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery. It is the first time YouTube has crossed that threshold.
A year earlier, the tables looked different. In 2024, YouTube’s $36.1 billion in ad revenue fell short of the $41.8 billion those four studios earned collectively.
The reversal in just 12 months is as striking as it is telling about where the advertising industry is heading.
The numbers behind the YouTube advertising milestone
Ad revenue is only part of the story. When subscriptions are included, YouTube’s total 2025 revenue climbed to more than $60 billion, making it larger than Netflix, which reported $45.18 billion for the full year. Only Disney, with $95.7 billion in total revenue, topped YouTube among entertainment companies.
YouTube’s parent company broke out the video platform’s total revenue for the first time in Alphabet’s latest earnings report, a signal of just how central YouTube has become to the broader business.
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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai noted the company now has over 325 million paid subscriptions across consumer services, a figure that includes YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, YouTube Music, and Google One.
YouTube TV alone surpassed 10 million U.S. subscribers as of November 2025, according to Cord Cutters News, making it the third-largest multichannel TV provider in the country, behind only Charter and Comcast.
How Hollywood lost the ad crown to YouTube
YouTube’s advertising dominance didn’t emerge overnight. It has been building for years as audiences, particularly younger ones, quietly migrated away from traditional TV toward on-demand and creator-driven content.
Each of the four major studios reported declining advertising revenue in 2025. WBD’s ad revenue fell 17% in its most recent quarter. NBCU’s domestic advertising declined 6.8% year over year. Disney and Paramount reported similar trends across their linear networks. These declines reflect a structural problem, not a temporary one.
YouTube, meanwhile, is winning the living room. In Q1 2025, YouTube ad spend on connected TV screens surpassed mobile for the first time, accounting for 43% of YouTube ad placements versus 42% on mobile. That is nearly double the CTV share from a year earlier, when it stood at just 24%.
Where YouTube’s growth comes from
YouTube’s blockbuster advertising business derives from several compounding factors that traditional studios simply cannot replicate at the same scale or speed.
Key drivers behind YouTube’s ad surge
- Shorts momentum: YouTube Shorts now averages 200 billion daily views, up significantly from the 70 billion figure cited earlier in 2025, giving advertisers enormous short-form inventory.
- Living room dominance: YouTube holds a 12.4% share of total U.S. TV viewing time, ranking first among all media companies, per Nielsen data.
- Podcast growth: Viewers watched more than 700 million hours of podcasts on YouTube via TV screens in October 2025 alone, up 70% year over year.
- Creator scale: YouTube has paid out more than $100 billion to creators, music companies, and media partners cumulatively, sustaining a content flywheel no studio can match.
- Live sports: YouTube’s first exclusive NFL game in September 2025 drew 19 million global viewers across more than 230 countries.
Why advertisers flock to YouTube
The advertiser migration to YouTube is not purely about audience size. It is about measurability.
Brands allocating budgets to YouTube can track outcomes in ways that linear TV has never been able to offer, from view-through attribution to cross-device tracking and real-time performance data.
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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai pointed to AI as a key accelerant of that advertiser shift. AI can deliver “the most relevant ad across surfaces and [match] advertisers against additional queries they weren’t reaching before,” Pichai said on the Q3 2025 earnings call. “AI Max helps advertisers discover new customers at the exact moment they need their product or service.”
That kind of precision targeting is something linear TV simply cannot offer.
It’s a striking endorsement for a platform that still trails Meta, which pulled in $196.2 billion in ad revenue in 2025, by a considerable margin. But in the media and entertainment category specifically, YouTube’s position is now uncontested.
Movie, TV studios are not standing still
Disney, NBCU, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery are all pouring resources into their own streaming platforms, and some are even beginning to distribute content on YouTube itself to chase the audiences that have already moved there.
But the gap is widening, not narrowing. YouTube’s ad revenue grew by nearly $4 billion year over year in 2025, while the combined studio total fell by roughly $3 billion. That is a $7 billion swing in a single year.
For investors watching Alphabet (GOOG), the YouTube story is no longer a footnote in the earnings report. It is increasingly the headline.
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