Those YouTube ads everyone hates made $10.4 billion in just three months

pcgamer.com:

There's not much we can agree on in this world of strife and tears, but there is one opinion that's just about universal: YouTube ads suck. Want to watch a video? Watch this ad first. Want to watch another video? Watch this longer ad! Can you click past the ad before it's over? Maybe—pay close attention to find out. As for ad blockers, YouTube is doing its best to make those more hassle than they're worth. It's obnoxious as hell, and it sucks.

Given how offputting and utterly detrimental to the experience its ads are, you might fairly wonder why YouTube keeps shovelling them on. Why does it work so hard to make YouTube worse? The answer is very simple: Those hated YouTube ads make, as they say in the Canadian scientific community, a metric ass-ton of cash.

Alphabet's Q4 financial results (via Variety) reveals that YouTube ads raked in more than $10.4 billion in the quarter—to be clear, that's 10 billion smackers in just three months. That's a relatively small slice of the total Alphabet pie, which topped $96 billion (again, in three months), but it's a staggering amount of money for three months of ads on the 'Tubes. It's also a new record, marking a 14% increase over YouTube's advertising revenue in Q4 2023, which hit $9.2 billion.

In its earnings call, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attributed much of that jump to the US election, which took place on November 5, 2024. Combined spending on YouTube ads by the Democratic and Republican parties was almost double what they spent in the 2020 elections, and more than 45 million people watched «election-related content on YouTube» on election day alone.

It's possible to dodge the deluge of ads, of course, by signing up for the YouTube Premium subscription service. That goes for $14 per month or $140 per year, which strikes me as an exorbitant amount of money for, y'know, YouTube. It'll be a cold day in hell before I throw that kind of money at, again, YouTube, but at least a few of my compatriots here at PC Gamer—like