YouTube revenue exceeds Mastercard, Netflix, and Nepal

YouTube has gone from a quirky site to share cat videos to one of the most powerful platforms on the planet. Despite offering endless hours of free content, it pulls in more money than many paid streaming services. Its revenue now rivals companies across industries and even surpasses that of some countries. We’ve looked into how much money YouTube actually makes and put the phenomenal amount of revenue into some sort of perspective.

We’re going to have to make a bit of an estimate here, but we’ll run you through our workings. The reason it’s not clear-cut is that Google bought YouTube a long time ago, and its parent company, Alphabet, doesn’t entirely separate the exact YouTube revenue figures from other Google services.

YouTube’s advertising is the most significant contributor to its revenue, and you often see this confused with its total earnings. We do have an exact figure for this. In the Alphabet 2023 financial accounts, YouTube ads have their own line item in the revenue section, and it’s a whopping $31.5 billion.

Then there’s the money YouTube makes from its subscription services, and this is where things get a bit less clear. The same Alphabet report lists another $34.7 billion from Google subscriptions, platforms, and devices. There’s no more detailed breakdown in the report, but this encompasses a load of other sales, such as Google Play services and Pixel devices.

During the earnings call for investors that followed the publication of this report, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet and Google, gave us more insight. He stated that the services part of that line item was $15 billion for 2023. Although this is mainly made up of YouTube Premium, YouTube Music, and YouTube TV, it also includes Google One cloud storage. Let’s assume that YouTube-related subscriptions make up about 75% to 80% of that $15 billion figure. That might not be very accurate, but we’re just trying to get a rough idea overall.

Adding that to the massive advertising sales figure, we get a total YouTube revenue for 2023 in the ballpark of $43 billion. That works out to around $118 million per day or $82,000 per minute!

YouTube is so ubiquitous in modern life that it can afford to offer a completely free, ad-supported service and still dwarf the revenue of purely paid streaming services. For comparison purposes, here are the 2023 revenues of some of its rival platforms:

• Netflix — $33.7 billion
• Spotify — $14.3 billion
• Amazon Prime Video — $14 billion
• Hulu — $11.2 billion
• Disney Plus — $8.4 billion
• Max — $7.7 billion

As you can see, YouTube generates more revenue than all of its competitors and more than Spotify, Hulu, Disney Plus, and Max combined. Not only does it outstrip Amazon Prime Video sales by over 300%, but it’s even comparable to the $40.2 billion revenue of the broader Amazon Prime service.

YouTube’s eye-watering revenue figure is comparable to that of some of the world’s most successful companies. For example, Coca-Cola also generated revenue of $43 billion in 2023, while Deutsche Bank and tech giant Oracle recorded revenues of $42.3 billion and $42.4 billion, respectively.

If YouTube weren’t part of Google and was on the Fortune 500, it would be around 340th place, above big hitters such as Xiaomi, Continental, Mitsubishi, and Starbucks. For even more context, Mastercard made $25.1 billion in revenue last year, PayPal recorded $29.8 billion, and Adobe $19.41 billion.

You get even more perspective on the YouTube Revenue figure when you compare it to the gross domestic product (GDP) of nations. According to Wikipedia’s list of countries by GDP for 2023, which contains over 180 countries, the $43 billion that YouTube pulled in last year would place the streaming platform just inside the top 100.

Remember, this is a platform that most users don’t pay for, yet YouTube generates a similar amount of money as Latvia, Bahrain, and Paraguay. It’s more than Nepal, more than Mali and Malta combined, and around five times more than the affluent microstate of Monaco. It’s pretty remarkable to consider in these terms, and also strange to think what the United States of YouTube might look like.