YouTube Statistics (2026): 79 Sourced Figures

This page collects figures on YouTube’s revenue, audience, viewing time and content enforcement. Every number links to the document that first published it. Revenue figures come from Alphabet’s filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Audience figures come from Pew Research Center, Nielsen and the UK communications regulator Ofcom. Platform figures come from YouTube’s own blog and Google’s Transparency Report, and are labeled as YouTube-reported. For a comparison of the tools that creators and marketing teams use to produce video, see the StatWharf comparison of AI video generators.

Key figures at a glance

Revenue and business

Advertising revenue

Alphabet reports YouTube ads as a separate revenue line. It covers revenue generated on YouTube properties. It does not include subscription revenue from YouTube Premium, YouTube Music, YouTube TV or NFL Sunday Ticket. Alphabet reports those inside “Google subscriptions, platforms, and devices”.

The 10-K states that YouTube ads revenue increased $4.2 billion from 2024 to 2025. Alphabet attributes the growth first to direct response advertising and then to brand advertising. In its fourth-quarter release, Alphabet also said YouTube revenue across ads and subscriptions exceeded $60 billion for the full year 2025. Alphabet gives no other combined figure. It does not break out subscription revenue for YouTube on its own.

Quarterly results show the same trend into 2026.

In the second quarter of 2025, YouTube ads revenue was $9,796 million. Alphabet’s third-quarter 2026 results were not out at the check date.

Subscriptions

• Alphabet reported more than 325 million paid subscriptions across its consumer services at the end of 2025, led by Google One and YouTube Premium.
• That count reached 350 million in the first quarter of 2026, with YouTube and Google One named as the key drivers.
• YouTube reported 125 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, including trials, in March 2025. The YouTube blog showed no later count for those two services at the check date.

Creator economy (YouTube-reported)

The figures below come from the annual letter by YouTube chief executive Neal Mohan. The letter was published on January 21, 2026. One figure comes from YouTube’s September 2026 product event.

• YouTube paid more than $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies in the four years before the letter.
• YouTube states that its ecosystem contributed $55 billion to US GDP in 2024 and supported more than 490,000 full-time jobs.
• More than 500,000 creators were in YouTube Shopping at the time of the letter.
• YouTube plans to expand its shopping affiliate program to 35 countries by the end of 2026.

Viewing on television

Nielsen’s The Gauge measures each platform’s share of all television viewing in the United States. It covers ad-supported and non-ad-supported viewing on TV sets. YouTube first moved into the lead of Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge in July 2024.

In July 2026, YouTube viewing rose 6% month over month. Its lead over the next media distributor widened to 5.0 share points. Streaming as a whole reached 49.0% of US TV viewing in the same month. The July 2026 period ran from June 29 to July 26 and included the final weeks of the FIFA World Cup 2026. Alphabet reported that over 1.7 billion unique viewers watched World Cup-related videos on YouTube during the tournament.

YouTube itself reports that viewers watch over one billion hours of YouTube on TV sets every day. It published that figure in June 2025.

Uploads, Shorts, live and podcasts (YouTube-reported)

YouTube first announced 200 billion average daily Shorts views at Cannes Lions in June 2025. It repeated the figure in January 2026. YouTube does not publish a monthly series for Shorts views, so no trend can be drawn from these two statements.

AI features

• In December 2025, more than 20 million users used YouTube’s Ask tool to learn more about the content they watched.
• In the same month, YouTube averaged more than 6 million daily viewers who watched at least 10 minutes of automatically dubbed content.
• In the first six months of the feature, creators dubbed more than 20 million videos with YouTube’s AI dubbing. YouTube reported this in June 2025.

Who uses YouTube in the United States

Pew Research Center surveyed 5,022 US adults from February 5 to June 18, 2025. YouTube was the most widely used platform in the survey. 84% of adults say they ever use it, compared with 71% for Facebook. In Pew’s 2024 survey the share was 85%. Pew describes YouTube use as stable in recent years.

YouTube and Facebook are the only platforms Pew asked about that a majority of every age group uses. In a separate Pew survey from February and March 2025, 33% of US adults said they visit YouTube several times a day.

News on YouTube

• 35% of US adults regularly got news on YouTube in a survey run from August 18 to 24, 2025. Only Facebook was higher, at 38%.
• The share was 23% in 2020 and 32% in 2024.
• In a Pew analysis of news influencers, 44% of the influencers in the sample were on YouTube.

Teens

Pew surveyed 1,458 US teens aged 13 to 17 for its December 2025 report. YouTube was the most used platform among teens.

• Roughly nine in ten teens say they ever use YouTube. Roughly three quarters use it every day.
• Boys are more likely to use YouTube than girls, at 94% against 89%.
• About one in five teens say they are on YouTube almost constantly. The share is 20% of boys and 13% of girls.
• 35% of Black teens say they are on YouTube almost constantly, compared with 23% of Hispanic teens and 8% of White teens.

YouTube also cites two commissioned surveys in its 2026 letter. A 2025 Kantar survey found that 93% of US viewers aged 18 to 27 agree that YouTube helps them learn new skills. A 2025 Oxford Economics survey found that 79% of US teachers who use YouTube agree it helps students learn. Both are YouTube-reported.

YouTube in the United Kingdom

Ofcom measures online use with Ipsos iris panel data. These figures exclude viewing on TV sets.

YouTube was the social platform with the highest reach and the most time spent among UK adults in May 2025. With that daily reach, YouTube entered Ofcom’s top five services by daily reach in May 2025.

Ofcom’s Media Nations report measures viewing in the home, including TV sets. People in the UK spent 39 minutes a day on YouTube at home in 2024. Of that, 16 minutes was on the household TV set. One in five children aged 4 to 15 go straight to YouTube as soon as they turn on the TV set. People aged over 55 watched 11 minutes a day of YouTube on TV sets in December 2024, up from 6 minutes in January 2023.

Content removals

Google’s Transparency Report publishes YouTube Community Guidelines enforcement each quarter. The latest quarter at the check date covers April to June 2026.

India was the largest country of upload for removed videos, with 3,441,973. The United States followed with 1,240,512. Country is based on the uploader’s IP address at the time of upload. YouTube terminates a channel for three strikes in 90 days or for a single case of severe abuse. It also terminates channels that exist only to break the guidelines. When a channel is terminated, all of its videos are removed.

Method

• Data window. Figures date from 2022 to September 2026. The page prefers the latest release of each series. Alphabet’s 2022 and 2023 revenue serve only as a trend baseline.
• Primary sources only. Each figure links to the body that first published it. These are Alphabet’s SEC filings and earnings releases, Nielsen, Pew Research Center, Ofcom, Google’s Transparency Report and the official YouTube blog. Statistics aggregators, roundups and articles that re-quote figures were not used. Platform figures from YouTube are labeled YouTube-reported. YouTube does not publish the method behind them.
• Checks. StatWharf Editorial opened each source in October 2026 and checked that the figure and its date appear there. Figures without a traceable primary source were left out. This includes widely repeated counts of YouTube’s monthly logged-in users and of Shorts monthly users, for which no current primary release was found.
• No modeling. The page reports published figures only. Annual revenue in the chart is rounded from the values in millions in the 10-K. No value is estimated by StatWharf.
• Measures differ. Pew counts adults who say they ever use YouTube. Nielsen counts share of TV viewing time on TV sets in US homes. Ofcom’s Online Nation figures exclude TV sets, while its Media Nations figures cover in-home viewing only. Comparisons are valid within one source, not across sources.

Using these figures

YouTube’s advertising business grew from about $29.2 billion in 2022 to $40.4 billion in 2025. YouTube now holds the largest share of US TV viewing of any media distributor in Nielsen’s measure. More than 20 million videos are uploaded every day. Teams that plan to publish more video on YouTube can compare AI video tools by product type, pricing unit and output in the StatWharf comparison of AI video generators. Other StatWharf data pages are listed in the research directory. Send corrections to any figure to the editorial address below.

Factual corrections are free: editorial@statwharf.com.