YouTube at 15: Surging Ad Revenue

In Alphabet's 2019 fiscal year results it was revealed for the first time how much the company makes from YouTube advertising. In its now 15 years of existence the revenue stream has created great wealth for many of the platform's content creators, but no one outside of Google had been able to put a solid figure on the value of ads for the company itself.

As this infographic shows, that value isn't just high - $15.15 billion in 2019 - it has been rising at a very healthy rate. The three years' worth of revenue figures show that since 2017's haul of $8.15 billion, the revenue stream has increased in size by 86 percent. The importance of YouTube advertising to the company's income statement has also increased. In 2017, this ad revenue represented 7.4 percent of total revenues. In 2019, this had risen to 9.4 percent.