YouTube Premium Reaches 20 Million Subscribers as Ad Revenue Surges
Google reveals that YouTube Music and Premium combine for 20 million paid subscribers, while YouTube TV doubles its user base to 2 million. The platform also reports a significant jump in overall ad revenue for 2019.
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai shares that YouTube Music and YouTube Premium now combine for 20 million paid subscribers. This marks steady growth from the 15 million Music subscribers reported last May. The services offer ad-free playback and offline downloads, with Premium providing an ad-free experience across all regular YouTube video content for $11.99 a month.
Meanwhile, the live TV streaming service YouTube TV doubles its subscriber base to 2 million, up from 1 million last March. This growth occurs alongside the recent shutdown of competing service PlayStation Vue. Priced at $49.99 per month, YouTube TV provides over 70 channels and continues to see subscription increases driven largely by live sports programming.
Pichai also highlights a $3 billion annual revenue run rate for YouTube subscriptions and other non-advertising revenue, though this comes alongside higher content acquisition costs. Furthermore, Google breaks out YouTube's advertising revenue for the first time, reporting $15.15 billion for 2019, which shows a substantial increase from $11.16 billion in the previous year.