YouTube’s revenue surpasses Mastercard, Netflix and Nepal

YouTube has gone from being a quirky site for sharing cat videos to one of the most powerful platforms on the planet. Despite offering unlimited free content, it still collects more revenue than many paid streaming services. Its revenues now rival companies in all industries and exceed revenues in some countries. We’ve looked into how much money YouTube actually makes, and put that staggering revenue amount into some perspective.

I’ll have to give you a little estimate here, but I’ll explain what I’m working on. The reason it’s not clear is because Google acquired YouTube a long time ago and its parent company, Alphabet, doesn’t fully separate YouTube’s exact revenue from other Google services.

Advertising is the biggest contributor to YouTube’s revenue, but I often see this confused with total revenue. We have exact numbers on this. In Alphabet’s 2023 financials, YouTube advertising has its own line item in the revenue section, which is a whopping $31.5 billion.

Next is the revenue that YouTube makes from its subscription services, where things get a little confusing. The same Alphabet report states that an additional $34.7 billion is spent from Google’s subscriptions, platforms, and devices. The report doesn’t provide further breakdowns, but it includes a number of other sales, including Google Play Services and Pixel devices.

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai gave us further insight during an earnings call with investors following the publication of this report. He said the services portion of that item will be $15 billion in 2023. This primarily consists of YouTube Premium, YouTube Music, and YouTube TV, but also includes Google One cloud storage. Let’s assume that YouTube-related subscriptions account for about 75% to 80% of that $15 billion. It might not be very accurate, but I’m just trying to get a general idea.

Add to this the massive ad sales, and YouTube’s total revenue in 2023 is estimated at $43 billion. This equates to approximately $118 million per day, or approximately $82,000 per minute.

YouTube is so ubiquitous in modern life that it can afford to offer a completely free, ad-supported service while still generating far less revenue than a purely paid streaming service. For comparison, here are the 2023 revenues of some competing platforms.

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

As you can see, YouTube makes more money than all of its competitors, making more money than Spotify, Hulu, Disney Plus, and Max combined. This not only exceeds Amazon Prime Video’s revenue by more than 300%, but also matches the broader Amazon Prime service’s $40.2 billion in revenue.

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

Without YouTube If it’s part of Google and in the Fortune 500; It ranks around 340th place, ahead of major players such as Xiaomi, Continental, Mitsubishi, and Starbucks. To explain further, Mastercard had revenue of $25.1 billion last year, PayPal had $29.8 billion, and Adobe had $19.41 billion.

Comparing YouTube’s revenue numbers to each country’s gross domestic product (GDP) tells us more. Wikipedia’s list of countries by GDP in 2023 includes more than 180 countries, and the $43 billion raised by YouTube last year puts the streaming platform among the top 100.

Remember, this is a platform where most users don’t pay, but YouTube makes as much money as Latvia, Bahrain, and Paraguay. That’s more than Nepal, more than Mali and Malta combined, and about five times more than the wealthy small nation of Monaco. It’s pretty amazing to think about it in this light, but it’s also strange to think about what YouTube America might look like.