YouTube Hits $5 Billion In Ad Revenue, 30 Million Premium And Music Subscribers In Q3

YouTube’s earnings appear to be back on track: The platform brought in $5 billion of ad revenue last quarter, a significant improvement over the $3.8 billion it brought in Q2, and up from $4 billion in Q1.

“We’re pleased at the degree to which advertisers really reactivated their budgets in the third quarter,” Ruth Porat, CFO of YouTube’s parent company Google and its parent company Alphabet, told investors. She also leaned into YouTube’s increasingly aggressive campaign to leach marketing dollars away from traditional television: “YouTube’s strong watch time growth enables advertisers to reach audiences they can’t reach on TV,” she said, per The Verge.

That watch time growth is up across all verticals, Porat said. During his own segment, Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted guided meditation videos and DIY face mask tutorials as particularly notable view generators.

In addition to revealing ad revenues, YouTube dropped some user stats: It now has more than 30 million paying Premium and Music subscribers (35 million, counting those currently on free trials) and 3 million YouTube TV subscribers.

As for Google overall, it, like YouTube, took a hit in Q2 from COVID-19, which resulted in its very first year-over-year decline in revenue. But in Q3, it climbed back up to total earnings of $46.2 billion—a 15.5% increase from the $40 billion it earned in Q3 2019. Out of the $46.2 billion, $37.1 billion came from advertising, it said.

Porat said that outside of YouTube, marketers increased spend on ads that appear in Google’s search results, and noted “continued strength in Google Cloud and Play.”