YouTube’s $60 Billion Year Is Making Netflix’s Warner Bros. Competition Case For It

Revenue for YouTube’s ads and subscriptions exceeded $60 billion for 2025 with over 325 million paid subscriptions led by Google One and YouTube Premium. The company announced the figure as part of its fourth quarter earnings report for 2025 on Wednesday after the stock market closed.

This news comes a day after Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and Warner Bros. chief strategy officer Bruce Campbell were grilled by the U.S. senate over Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros., a hearing during which YouTube was mentioned repeatedly. Opponents of the $83 billion merger argue that the deal will violate antitrust laws, competition policies and consumer rights. But representatives for Netflix, Warner Bros. and Paramount — the company still hoping to acquire WB — have argued that a merger would leave the resulting company better prepared to compete with companies like YouTube. And Google’s 2025 earnings report unintentionally made Netflix’s case a lot clearer.

During the call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted that YouTube has been the No. 1 streamer in the U.S. for nearly three years based on overall living room watch time reported by Nielsen. That wasn’t the only favorite stat the company mentioned. In October of 2025, viewers watch over 700 million hours of podcasts on living room devices, a 75% increase from the year prior. YouTube Shorts now averages 200 billion daily views and traction has increased in the living room. As for YouTube TV, the company has seen a great deal of interest in its skinny bundle options.

YouTube’s many investment in AI tools fro creators are also being used. Every day in December, over 1 million channels used YouTube’s AI creation tools.

The company announced it will continue to make investments for creators. More innovations will come around shoppable ads as Google intends to make YouTube a “premier shopping destination,” Philipp Schindler, senior vice president and chief business officer for Google, said. The company will also be investing in YouTube’s Creator Partnership Hub, which connects creators to brands, and offering Google’s AI-powered world generation model Genie to creators. The offering was announced earlier this year. Pichai noted that all of Google’s tools including Genie, its music generation model Lyria and its video generator Veo are designed for the company’s users.

“We are going to keep incorporating these tools. Already, creators are responding by adopting these, but we do want to put creators at the center of the experience,” Pichai said. “That’s very, very important to us. For us, it’s making sure YouTube is a voice for creator expression. That’s the foundation by which we will approach this.”

These innovations mark the difference between a more traditional media company like Disney or even Netflix compared to YouTube. Whereas the biggest studios in Hollywood have to worry about massive content spends and fighting to secure the best talent, creators come specifically to YouTube. Of course, Alphabet spends a great deal of money on updating YouTube’s features. But Alphabet’s 2025 earnings report further highlighted that these companies are playing very different games.

Here are the results for both the quarter and 2025 as a whole:

Net income: $34.5 billion for the quarter, a 30% increase compared to $26.5 billion a year ago. For fiscal year 2025, net income increased by 32% compared to the previous year, hitting $132.2 billion.

Earnings per share: $2.82 per share for the quarter, compared to $2.65 per share expected from analysts estimates compiled by Yahoo Finance. For the year, earnings per share came in at $10.81, a 34% increase compared to the $8.04 reported in 2024.

Revenue: $113.8 billion for the quarter, up 18% year over year and above the $111.4 billion expected from analysts estimates compiled by Yahoo Finance. For the year, revenue increased 15% compared to last year, hitting $402.8 billion.

YouTube Ad Revenue: $11.4 billion for the quarter, a 9% increase from the $10.5 billion reported a year ago.

Google Subscriptions, Platforms and Devices: $13.6 billion for the quarter, a 17% increase from the $11.6 billion reported a year ago.

Schindler also explained the intricacies of YouTube’s annual revenue. The more than $60 billion in revenue the segment saw during the year was driven by strong growth and response on the brand side. The growth rate lapped the strong spend the segment saw on U.S. elections.

“It’s important to think about YouTube ads and subs holistically, because, when a user shifts from being an ad-supported user to YouTube Music and Premium customer, it has a slightly negative impact on YouTube ads or revenues but a positive impact on our business,” Schindler explained. “We had strong revenue growth in YouTube subscriptions this quarter, particularly in the YouTube Music and Premium category.”

For the first time in the company’s history, Alphabet surpassed $400 billion in annual revenue. Growth in Alphabet’s AI division, particularly the launch of Gemini 3, as well as increased search led to the notable year. The Gemini App has over 750 million monthly active users, the company revealed in its earnings report.

Alphabet saw growth across every major category. During the fourth quarter of 2025, Google Cloud saw a 48% to $17.7 billion, which was led by an increase in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) across enterprise AI infrastructure and solutions. Google Cloud ended 2025 with an annual run rate of over $70
billion, which was driven by demand for AI products. In the past several months, Alphabet has made several AI deals with major competitors like Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and Apple. This huge Google Cloud jump shows that these deals have started to pay off.

Revenue from the Google services division increased 14%. That boost was led by 17% growth in Google Search and other; 17% in Google subscriptions, platforms and devices; and 9% in YouTube ads.

Heading into Alphabet’s earnings call, shares were down 0.6% to $331.43.

Looking ahead, the company expects its capital expenditure to double. Alphabet plans to spend between $175 to 185 billion, an increase from its $91.4 billion capex spend in 2025.

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