Alphabet‘s stock jumped more than 6% in after-hours trading following a strong quarterly earnings call–a call that multiple times gave credit to YouTube for driving growth.
It’s been just over six years since Alphabet started disclosing YouTube’s ad revenue as part of its quarterly earnings calls. The first disclosure, released in February 2020, revealed that across all of 2019, YouTube made a total of ~$15 billion in ad revenue. That was up from ~$10 billion total in 2018.
Now? YouTube is raking in $10 billion a quarter.
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Q1 2026 earnings showed YouTube brought in $9.88 billion, a 10.7% year-over-year increase from Q1 2025.
The figure was slightly shy of analyst expectations ($9.99 billion), but still an enormous jump from where the platform was pre-COVID–and a sizable portion of Google’s total ad revenue, which came in at $77.25 billion for the quarter, a 15.5% increase from this time last year.
Alphabet also nodded to YouTube as one of the core components driving the company’s overall paid subscriptions to 350 million. This follows a late 2025 announcement that revealed YouTube Premium hit 125 million subscribers. We’re curious to see if that number falls off at all in the wake of a second price hike…
The other subscription growth factor Alphabet pointed to was Google One, a bundle subscription for Google’s AI, cloud storage, and other features. And, speaking of AI, Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Google Search had a strong quarter “with AI experiences driving usage, queries at an all-time high, and 19% revenue growth.”
YouTube may play a part there too, considering creators’ videos are the leading source LLMs like Google’s AI search summaries use to find information for querents. But Google Search’s surge is worth noting for another reason: It might be a bit of a comeback after TikTok proved to be cutting into Google’s traffic by becoming a place for Gen Z to find info, recommendations for products, and even deets on local digs. Recent data shows the youths are still using TikTok as a search engine, but Google clearly hopes pushing AI as hard as possible will keep it on top of the search game.
“This was our strongest quarter ever for our consumer AI plans, driven by the Gemini App,” Pichai said. (Gemini was trained on YouTube videos, a point of contention for creators, and also cites them for answers to users’ questions.)
Alphabet’s total revenue for the quarter was $109.9 billion, with net income of $62.6 billion (aka $5.11 per share). That beat analyst expectations of ~$107 billion and $2.63/share.
