YouTube ad revenue reaches $9.88B, falling shy of Wall Street’s expectations

YouTube posted double-digit ad revenue growth in the first quarter of 2026.

The video site posted a staggering $9.88 billion in revenue from advertising during the first three months of the year, which is up 10.7% year over year.

Despite that large figure, the number did fall short of analysts’ projections of $9.99 billion.

YouTube’s financials were part of parent company Alphabet’s first-quarter earnings report. 

On a broader scale, the Google unit of Alphabet posted $77.25 billion in advertising revenue, which was up 15.5%. That number includes YouTube’s revenue as well as the company’s robust search and display advertising products.

YouTube also generates revenue from paid subscription plans that remove most advertising as well as its music and vMVPD offering YouTube TV.

Google didn’t break down its subscription numbers by service, but did indicate it added 25 million subscribers to its consumer offerings, which include YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, YouTube Music and select cloud services as well as the Google One bundle offering.

That puts Google at 350 million paid subscribers.

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These figures do not include business and enterprise subscriptions to services such as Google Cloud or Google Workspace, though these plans typically don’t include access to YouTube services.

The company has been in the middle of a shift that has seen advertising revenue contract while paid plan income grows, which echoes broader trends among streaming services. 

Many full-fledged streamers have found it beneficial to offer lower-cost plans that contain advertising, likely driven by an increasing cluttered subscription marketplace as consumers grow weary of recurring charges.

In these cases, advertising revenue helps offset the lower subscription rate and the strategy has become a compromise of sorts between streamers and more price-sensitive consumers. 

YouTube, however, limits most advertising insertion to users visiting the video site without any paid subscription (similar in some ways to the model Peacock originally used). 

The service does offer YouTube Premium Lite, which has a lower price point and still features advertising in YouTube Shorts, search results, music content and select other content. 

The plan, which also does not include access to YouTube Music Premium, is about half the cost of YouTube Premium and is targeted toward users more interested in more traditional online video content.