YouTube’s SVOD business is helping fuel the platform’s domination of TV, too

It seems like YouTube’s gargantuan ads business may never stop getting bigger. And its subscription video business is doing just fine, too: Subscription revenue makes up a third of YouTube’s total revenue, CEO Neal Mohan said onstage at this month’s MoffettNathanson Media, Internet, and Communications Conference in New York.

• The company has been investing significantly in YouTube TV and YouTube Premium with new content offerings and viewing features, which has paid off in subscriber growth, Mohan said.
• There are more than 125 million paid subscribers on YouTube Music and YouTube Premium as of 2025, he noted, a milestone the company announced a year ago.

It’s all a part of YouTube’s moves to continue to own living-room viewing.

“One of the nice things [about being] at YouTube and being part of the Alphabet family is we can make long-term bets…One of the longest bets that we made, and people thought we were crazy at the time, was investing in our subscriptions business,” he said. “When we were making those bets, people [were] like, ‘Well, why would people pay? You already offer all of this for free.’”

Pick and choose: YouTube has built out packages and features for consumers in an effort to make YouTube TV more attractive to consumer sets. That includes over 10 new content packages, or “skinny bundles,” which focus on different genres. Mohan expects the rollout to help increase the company’s total addressable market.

• The Sports Plan, for example, costs $64.99 a month, while the Sports + News Plan costs $71.99 a month, and includes access to more than 30 sports-focused channels, including ESPN, FS1, and NBC Sports Network.
• YouTube is also offering more flexible pricing with packages, like its ad-supported YouTube Premium Lite, which costs $8.99 a month, or its ad-free Premium tier, which costs $15.99 a month.

YouTube has also rolled out ways to watch over time, including a more customizable version of multiview, which allows users to consume up to four channels at once, Mohan said. YouTube also wants to expand its Primetime Channels offering, which allows consumers to watch content from streaming services including Paramount+ and Starz inside YouTube, to more countries, he said.

The download: It’s an effort to aggregate as much content, short- or long-form, on YouTube as possible for users to find in one place. As it expands its content offerings, the platform raised prices on YouTube Premium last month for the first time in three years, increasing the individual plan cost to $15.99/month from $13.99/month. Mohan justified the price hikes as a means to put content in front of users.

“One of the strengths of YouTube is that you get everything from your 15-second Shorts from your favorite creators to 15-hour livestreams to three-hour NFL games and everything in between,” he said. “That is an intentional vision. A lot of our investment goes towards that. When we see pockets of content that are missing, we innovate.”

Reap what you saw: YouTube’s TV investments seem to be paying off. Mohan said that YouTube added the most YouTube Premium non-trial subscribers globally and in the US in the product’s history last quarter, Mohan said. The living-room screen, he added, has also become one of the “fast-growing places” where viewers are watching Shorts, the company’s short-form answer to TikTok.

YouTube TV is also faring better than some vMVPD competitors. While YouTube does not break out subscriber numbers for YouTube TV, it surpassed 10 million subscribers last year, according to reporting from Deadline.

• Fubo and Hulu + Live TV, meanwhile, reported having 5.7 million paid subscribers in North America in the quarter that ended on March 31, while Sling TV reported having 1.79 million subscribers in the most recent quarter.
• Charter still reigns supreme in US pay TV, with 12 million residential video customers in Q1.

According to data provided by Antenna to Marketing Brew, YouTube TV skinny bundles saw nearly 72,000 sign-ups in March from subscribers who hadn’t previously been subscribed to YouTube TV, while roughly 37,000 people who were already YouTube TV subscribers chose a skinny bundle that month. (Antenna counts a subscriber who chooses more than one skinny bundle as just one sign-up.)

“That’s what you should expect us to continue to invest in: the viewer and creator experience,” Mohan said. “In my view, and I’ve been in the ad business for a long time, the advertising opportunities really stem from that.”