YouTube, the internet’s biggest streaming video platform, delivered a healthy 13.8% increase in global ad revenue for the year-end 2024 quarter to surpass $10 billion for the first time.
YouTube’s record Q4 ad sales of $10.473 billion topped Wall Street analysts’ consensus estimate of $10.23 billion. That’s just one piece of YouTube’s business, not including subscription revenue from services like YouTube TV or YouTube Premium. Last fall, parent company Alphabet said YouTube’s total revenue topped $50 billion for the 12-month period that ended in September 2024 for the first time.
Overall, Alphabet reported Q4 revenue of $96.47 billion and net income of $26.54 billion, or $2.15 per share. That was shy of the $96.67 billion analysts expected on the top line, while the tech giant beat the earnings estimate of EPS of $2.13.
The increase in YouTube ad revenue was driven by the 2024 U.S. election — with both political parties almost doubling their spending compared with the 2020 elections, Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler said on the earnings call. On election day (Nov. 5), more 45 million viewers in the U.S. watched content related to the election on YouTube, according to the company.
Amid its continued growth in search and video, Alphabet has been investing heavily in AI to keep pace with the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta. Last month U.S. tech companies were rattled by results touted by Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek, which said it developed a new large language model (LLM) that was far more efficient than other systems.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, said the company expects to invest approximately $75 billion in capital expenditures in 2025.
“Q4 was a strong quarter driven by our leadership in AI and momentum across the business,” Pichai said in prepared remarks. “We are building, testing, and launching products and models faster than ever, and making significant progress in compute and driving efficiencies… Our results show the power of our differentiated full-stack approach to AI innovation and the continued strength of our core businesses.”
Pichai said that the “AI-powered Google Cloud portfolio is seeing stronger customer demand.” For Q4, Google Cloud revenue came in at $11.96 billion, up 30.1% year over year but short of Wall Street expectations of $12.1 billion.
Together, Google Cloud and YouTube ended 2024 with an annual revenue run rate of $110 billion, according to Pichai. For the full year, YouTube’s ad revenue totaled $36.15 billion.
On the AI front, in December YouTube announced a partnership with CAA to let talent identify — and take down — AI-generated fakes of themselves uploaded to the video platform. YouTube is trying to convey the message to Hollywood that it is trying to be a good partner to creative industries by taking proactive steps to build “responsible AI.”
YouTube continues to dominate viewing on TV relative to other streamers. In December 2024, YouTube viewing on connected TVs in the U.S. increased to capture a record 11.1% share of TV usage among streaming platforms ahead of Netflix (8.5%), Prime Video (4.0%), Hulu (2.5%) and Disney+ (2.1%), according to Nielsen.
YouTube’s scale is massive: Worldwide, users watch more than 1 billion hours on average of YouTube content on TVs daily, according to the company. More than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
Meanwhile, Alphabet is facing potentially major changes as the result of the Justice Department’s successful antitrust case against the company. A federal court last year held that Google broke the law by inking multibillion-dollar deals to make its search engine the default on browsers and smartphones including devices from Apple and Samsung. The DOJ’s proposed remedies include forcing Google to divest the Chrome browser. The judge overseeing the case is expected to rule on a remedy after a two-week trial scheduled for April 2025.
