YouTube advertising revenue jumped to $8.9 billion in the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2024, up from $7.9 billion a year earlier.
YouTube’s parent company, Alphabet, beat Wall Street’s revenue and profit expectations with revenue increased 15% compared to last year to reach $88.3 billion, with Google advertising representing most of the revenue, while net income increased 34% to reach $26.3 billion.
Google’s subscriptions, platforms, and devices business, which includes YouTube TV, NFL Sunday Ticket and YouTube Premium among other offerings, had revenue of $10.6 billion, up from $8.3 billion a year ago.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai noted that Youtube’s total ads and subscription revenues came in $50 billion over the past four quarters for the first time. Executives said that short-form video creation “continues to thrive on YouTube,” noting that of all channels uploading to YouTube each month, 70% are uploading shorts, with 70 billion shorts watched daily. The company has also been upping its monetization efforts on shorts.
The company also recently began its second season of NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV, which “ continues to receive a positive reception from advertisers, our partners at the NFL and fans.” Advertising commitments were up 20% year-over-year after the company’s Upfront presentation.
The company also recently announced major project updates to YouTube that include a sleep timer, customizable playback speeds, the ability to create custom playlist thumbnails using generative AI and more.
AI is becoming a larger part of the company, with the company using AI in its search process and internally to improve the company’s coding process – more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI and then reviewed by engineers, Pichai said. A reorganization of teams has also led to Google engineers working faster, with a small team building the tool NotebookLM, which Pichai called “ an incredibly popular product that has so much promise,” and one that has recently introduced a new tool that can be used to create an AI version of a podcast, based off of source documents.
Asked to provide an update on the Department of Justice case against Google and its search business, in which a federal judge recently ruled Google violated antitrust laws by sidelining competitors and giving customers who did not use Google a worse experience, Pichai said the company will “vigorously defend” itself.
“First of all, we plan to vigorously defend these cases and some of the early proposals from the DOJ have been far reaching, and, I think they could have unintended consequences, particularly to the dynamic tech sector, and the American leadership there and so we plan to be planning to engage very vigorously there,” Pichai said on the earnings call.