By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 18th, 2024
As part of the company’s efforts to release granular earnings reports for its subsidiaries, Alphabet Inc. has shared YouTube 2019 earnings at $15 billion. The platform saw a 36% surge in revenue compared to its previous year 2018.
Google‘s parent company Alphabet released its Q4 2019 earnings report on Monday. February 3. With 2019’s total revenue standing at $162 billion, Alphabet also registered an 18% YoY growth.
Surprisingly, Alphabet also unveiled the earnings of its popular video content distribution platform YouTube for the very first time. Youtube saw its quarterly Q4 earnings standing at $5 billion and its annual earnings standing at $15 billion. Youtube’s earnings saw a 36% jump in 2019 compared to its $11.2 billion earnings in the previous year 2018.
In the earnings report, Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive Officer of Alphabet and Google, said:
“I’m really pleased with our continued progress in Search and in building two of our newer growth areas — YouTube, already at $15 billion in annual ad revenue, and Cloud, which is now on a $10 billion revenue run rate.
Ruth Porat, Chief Financial Officer of Alphabet and Google, stated:
“To provide further insight into our business and the opportunities ahead, we’re now disclosing our revenue on a more granular basis, including for Search, YouTube ads and Cloud. “We expect substantial opportunity in direct response and brand advertisers,” he added.
A major part of the YouTube earnings comes from the advertisement revenue which Google generates on the platform. Google took over YouTube 14 years back in 2006. Since then, Google has focused on developing this platform as a knowledge and entertainment powerhouse.
Last year in 2019, YouTube’s monthly active users crossed 2 billion as the graph continues to surge northwards. Apart from the traditional Google Search engine, YouTube is also emerging as a powerful search platform for Google.
YouTube’s Growing Subscriber Base for Its Premium Services
With the media-streaming war escalating over the internet giants, YouTube is also introducing new services to its users. YouTube says that it has over 20 million subscribers for its ad-free services and music offerings. This subscriber-base contributes to the platform earnings along with the advertisement revenue.
Besides, YouTube has also generated revenue from the 2 million subscribers of its paid TV services. Here, YouTube is competing with giants like Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV Plus, Amazon Prime, and others.
It is the first earnings report from Alphabet after company CEO Sundar Pichai took the complete charge in December 2019. Sundar was promoted after company co-founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped down from their executive positions in the same month.
Google Cloud Services Amass $10 Billion Revenue
Along with YouTube, Google has also unveiled the revenue from its cloud-based services. Google’s Cloud infrastructure comprises of popular enterprise-grade services like GMail/Docs/Drive/Hangouts.
The Google Cloud registered an impressive $2.61 billion round with an annual run-rate of over $10 billion for q4 2019. This is up from the Q4 2018 figures of $1.71 billion revenue, and a run rate of $6.84 billion.