A living room with a large flat-screen TV on the wall

Google Cloud Doubled. YouTube’s Ad Business Grew 9%.

Alphabet’s third quarter showed YouTube’s ad growth cooling as its subscription base passed 150 million, a split every media company selling to the living room should study.

Vault Editorial
2–3 minutes

Alphabet’s third quarter showed YouTube’s ad growth cooling as its subscription base passed 150 million, a split every media company selling to the living room should study.

Alphabet’s cloud business doubled in a year. YouTube grew at a far more ordinary pace. In third-quarter results released Oct. 28, Alphabet reported $127.6 billion in revenue, up 25%, while YouTube ad revenue rose to $11.2 billion from $10.26 billion a year earlier, according to the company’s earnings release and TheWrap.

That works out to roughly 9% growth, down from 13% in the second quarter and 11% in the first, Music Business Worldwide calculated. Subscriptions slowed too. Alphabet’s subscriptions, platforms and devices line, which includes YouTube Premium, YouTube TV and NFL Sunday Ticket, rose 11% to $14.29 billion after growing 15% and 19% in the two prior quarters.

The figure the music and media business will remember is a subscriber count. Chief executive Sundar Pichai said Alphabet “surpassed 150 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, including trials.” That compares with 125 million in March 2025, per MBW, a pace of about 1.3 million net additions a month, slower than the roughly 2 million a month YouTube averaged the year before. Price helps cushion it. YouTube raised its U.S. Premium individual plan from $13.99 to $15.99 in April.

A person holding a gray TV remote control
Photo: Jonas Leupe / Unsplash

On the earnings call, chief business officer Philipp Schindler said “subscriptions continue to grow faster than ads,” and that living room viewing now accounts for more than a third of YouTube’s ad revenue, MBW reported. For traditional TV networks, that is the line to underline.

Profit moved the other way. Net income fell to $26.5 billion from $35 billion and diluted earnings per share dropped to $2.12 from $2.87, largely because of an $8.7 billion loss on equity securities, according to the release. Google Cloud, meanwhile, brought in $30.7 billion, 9to5Google noted.

Two things to watch. One is whether YouTube’s ad growth recovers in the fourth quarter, when holiday budgets land. The other is whether Alphabet ever splits out YouTube Music from Premium, a number it still reports as one combined figure, leaving labels and rivals like Spotify to guess at the mix.

Sources

Photos: Spacejoy / Unsplash; Jonas Leupe / Unsplash, used under the Unsplash License. Photos are illustrative and do not depict the people or companies in this story.

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