YouTube generated $9.88 billion in advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2026 (three months ended March 31, 2026), up 10.7 percent year-over-year and the platform’s twentieth consecutive quarter of double-digit ad-revenue growth, per Alphabet’s April 29 earnings release.
The 13.3 percent step-down from Q4 2025’s record $11.4 billion looks dramatic on the bar chart and isn’t. Q1 has been YouTube’s smallest quarter every year since Alphabet started disclosing the segment, and the Q4-to-Q1 retreat has averaged 13 to 15 percent across the past three years. What’s directionally interesting is that the YoY growth rate held: 10.7 percent in Q1 2026 versus 10.3 percent in Q1 2025. After three quarters of accelerating year-over-year growth (13 percent in Q2, 15 percent in Q3 2025), Q1 2026 came back to roughly the prior-year run rate.
The line that tells the bigger story isn’t on the chart. Total paid subscriptions across Google services crossed 350 million in the quarter, up from 325 million at end-2025. Alphabet doesn’t break out YouTube subscriptions inside the bucket; Google One, Pixel financing, Play, YouTube Premium, YouTube Music, and YouTube TV all live in the same Subscriptions, Platforms & Devices line. But CEO Sundar Pichai called out that YouTube Music and YouTube Premium delivered “the largest quarterly increase in non-trial subscribers” since the paid tier launched in June 2018, both globally and in the U.S. Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler told the call that “subscription revenue continues to grow faster than ads.”
That framing matters more for ad buyers than the headline ad number does. Every YouTube Premium upgrade is a Premium subscriber who sees no ads, which is the mix-shift Pichai has been pre-warning analysts about for three earnings cycles in a row. The Q1 print is the first quarter where the framing translates into a hard subscriber milestone: net adds of roughly 25 million in one quarter across the Google subscription bundle, with YouTube cited as the leading driver.
The competitive read is similar. YouTube’s $9.88 billion Q1 ad bar clears Roku’s Q1 platform revenue of $1.13 billion by roughly 9x and approaches Netflix’s quarterly subscription line. Full-year 2025 YouTube revenue (ads plus subscriptions) topped $60 billion, making YouTube as a standalone business larger than Netflix and tied with Disney’s combined direct-to-consumer segment. The Q1 step-down doesn’t change the structural picture; it just exposes the seasonality the trend bar reveals.
Alphabet’s next print lands in late July. The trade-press question by then will not be whether YouTube’s ad line crossed $10 billion again. Q2 will almost certainly. It will be whether Alphabet starts breaking out YouTube subscriptions on its own line, finally giving the upfronts buyers a clean ads-plus-subs split they’ve been asking for since the Q4 2025 disclosure put the $60 billion figure on the table.
