Like an increasing number of people I’m finding the ‘Ad’ experience incredibly infuriating. Especially in a world where UCX is the ball game, And it’s getting worse!
I then remember that there is an option to bite the bullet and just go “premium” for €14 per month but I’ve been resisting this as I resent being charged €168 a year to pay YouTube to remain tracking my data & using it across the Alphabet (Google) universe of companies. (yeah I know!)
I’ve long accepted the “if its free then you’re the product” faustian pact we make with our social media/web usage so it’s fair I deeply resent the sheer brazen approach of Alphabet to not only make me the product, but now want to charge me €168 a year for the priviledge and all I get in return is the ability to have the algorithm feed me my diet of Rory Sutherland, Rick Beato, Liverpool Football Club FC and various cooking clips without the torment of ad interruption 😊
And then I read a report about Alphabet’s recent earnings report and it all became clear… these folks are geniuses and they’ve managed to pull off one of the smartes business models I’ve ever come across…
YouTube made about $60 billion in revenue in 2025.
$40B came from advertising.
$20B came from subscriptions… from users paying not to see those ads.
Both are growing at double-digit rates.
Which tells you something important about the economics of the platform.
Around 2.7 billion people use YouTube every month, but only 125 million pay for Premium.
That’s just 4.6% of users generating roughly one-third of total revenue
So the platform’s optimisation problem is fairly obvious:
Make ads annoying enough that some users decide €14/month for Premium is worth it…But keep them tolerable enough that the other 95% keep watching.
Because those viewers are still valuable to advertisers. In effect, YouTube operates like a two-way toll booth:
✅ Advertisers pay to get in front of you.
✅ You pay to make them disappear.
And YouTube earns money both ways, during the same viewing session, on the same content, using the same infrastructure.
The subscription business alone (Premium, Music and YouTube TV) now generates about $20B annually – larger than Spotify’s entire revenue.
And it’s growing fast.
About 2 million new paying subscribers were added each month through 2024.
Meanwhile, the ad business continues to expand!
YouTube now accounts for 12.4% of total TV viewing time in the US, and Shorts delivers 70 billion views every day.
Advertising revenue grew 9% to $40B.
So both sides of the market keep getting bigger. Because YouTube has discovered something powerful:
The product sold to advertisers (your attention) is the exact same product sold back to you (your attention, uninterrupted).
A $60 billion business built on one simple idea:
Attention is the only asset you can sell twice.
