YouTube Ad Revenue Hits Record $11.38 Billion in Q4, but Falls Short of Expectations

YouTube continues to vacuum up digital advertising dollars, mostly at the expense of traditional TV ad budgets, notching its biggest-ever ad sales number to date for the fourth quarter of 2025. However, the video giant’s ad haul came in below Wall Street forecasts.

In the last three months of the year, YouTube’s global ad revenue totaled $11.38 billion, a year-over-year increase of 8.7%, parent company Alphabet reported. Wall Street analysts on average forecast YouTube ad revenue coming in at $11.84 billion, per StreetAccount. YouTube’s business also encompasses subscription revenue from YouTube TV, YouTube Premium and YouTube Music, which isn’t broken out by Alphabet.

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Overall, Alphabet, also the parent of Google, posted Q4 revenue of $113.8 billion (up 18%) and net income of $34.5 billion (up 30%), or $2.82 per share. That handily topped analyst consensus estimates for $111.43 billion revenue and EPS of $2.63.

During the quarter, YouTube inked a deal with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for exclusive global rights to the Oscars awards ceremony beginning in 2029 and running through 2033, nabbing the media rights from ABC. Last month the BBC announced a partnership with YouTube under which the U.K. broadcaster will produce original content for the platform and launch new YouTube channels aimed at children and young adults.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, in his 2026 letter to the community outlining the platform’s priorities for the year, touted new AI tools coming for creators and said more than 1 million channels used YouTube’s AI tools daily in December 2025. At the same time, the rise of artificial intelligence has raised concerns about “AI slop,” he said, and YouTube is working on “reducing the spread of low-quality, repetitive content.”

YouTube Shorts, the platform’s short-form video format, now averages 200 billion daily views, according to Mohan. This year, YouTube will integrate different formats, like image posts, directly into the Shorts feed. In addition, YouTube TV will soon launch a “fully customizable multiview” feature, letting users watch several live channels on one screen, and will roll out at least 10 lower-cost, genre-specific YouTube TV plans spanning sports, entertainment and news.