71 YouTube Statistics for Creators and Marketers 2026

Below are 71 YouTube statistics covering audience size, watch time, Shorts, advertising, the creator economy and the platform’s AI tools.

Every figure traces to the organization that produced it: Alphabet’s SEC filings and earnings calls, YouTube’s own announcements, Nielsen, Pew Research Center, the Reuters Institute, Oxford Economics and Tinuiti.

That sourcing bar matters more here than in most statistics roundups, because YouTube is the platform where the most-quoted numbers are the least verifiable. Two of the figures you see in almost every YouTube article, the “2.7 billion monthly active users” and the “500 hours of video uploaded every minute,” cannot be traced to anything YouTube or Alphabet has published recently. The upload figure is below with its date and caveat attached, because it is the last one anyone published. The user count is not, because a defensible replacement exists and is used in its place.

Key Takeaways

• YouTube’s revenue is now bigger than most media companies, and it is disclosed. More than $60 billion in 2025 across ads and subscriptions, with $11.4 billion of advertising in the fourth quarter alone.
• The living room is the story, not mobile. YouTube took 13.8% of all U.S. television viewing time in June 2026, more than any other media company. It has led that ranking in nearly every month since February 2025, losing only February 2026 to the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics.
• Shorts hit 200 billion daily views, but the counting rules changed in the middle of the run. On 31 March 2025 YouTube started counting a swipe-by as a view. The 200 billion figure is after that change; the 70 billion figure everyone compares it to is before. They are not the same measurement.
• Nobody outside Google knows YouTube’s monthly active users. Alphabet has never disclosed it. The number in circulation comes from Google’s advertising planner, which reports ad reach, not users.
• The creator payout number is real but broader than it sounds. Over $100 billion in four years, and that pool covers creators, artists and media companies, including music rights holders.
• A fifth of YouTube’s video ad spend is now short-form, and half of that lands on a TV. Shorts took roughly 21% of spend on traditional YouTube video campaigns in the fourth quarter of 2025, and 49% of Shorts ad spend went to television screens.

Top YouTube Statistics for 2026

If you carry a handful of numbers into a meeting about YouTube, carry these six.

The Numbers Worth Quoting

1. YouTube’s revenue across advertising and subscriptions passed $60 billion for the full year 2025 (Alphabet Q4 2025 earnings call, February 2026).

2. YouTube advertising revenue was $11.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 9% year over year (Alphabet Q4 2025 results, Exhibit 99.1).

3. YouTube Shorts averages more than 200 billion views per day, announced by CEO Neal Mohan in June 2025 (YouTube, Cannes 2025).

4. 84% of U.S. adults say they have used YouTube, making it the most widely used online platform in the country (Pew Research Center, Americans’ Social Media Use 2025, n=5,022).

5. YouTube took 13.8% of all U.S. television viewing time in June 2026, the largest share of any media distributor (Nielsen, The Gauge).

6. YouTube has paid more than $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies over the four years from 2022 to 2025 (Neal Mohan, The Future of YouTube 2026).

Why These Six and Not the Popular Ones

Four of these six come from documents Alphabet or YouTube filed or published under their own name, which is a lower bar than it sounds and one that most circulating YouTube statistics fail.

Numbers 4 and 5 are the two I would defend hardest in a room full of skeptics, because both organizations publish their methodology and neither takes its numbers from YouTube. Pew’s figure comes from an address-based probability sample of 5,022 U.S. adults. Nielsen’s comes from the panel it also uses to price television advertising, and Nielsen does sell measurement services to Google, so the independence here is in the method rather than in the commercial relationship. Both are the freshest editions available: Pew published in November 2025, Nielsen in August 2026.

Number 6 is the one to handle with care. It is real, YouTube published it, and the pool is broader than “creators.” It includes music rights holders and media companies, and the four-year window is chosen by YouTube rather than by any accounting convention.

YouTube User and Audience Statistics

This is the section where the most-repeated numbers are the weakest. Alphabet has never disclosed YouTube’s monthly active users in an earnings release or a 10-K, so every “2.5 billion users” or “2.7 billion users” headline you have read traces back to a third-party estimate of YouTube’s advertising reach, not to a user count. The figures below name which is which.

Global Reach

7. YouTube’s advertising audience reached 2.53 billion people in January 2025, according to figures published in Google’s own ad planning tools (DataReportal, Essential YouTube Stats).

8. That advertising audience grew by 39.7 million people, or 1.6%, between January 2024 and January 2025 (DataReportal).

9. YouTube ads reach 45.5% of the world’s internet users and about four in ten of the world’s adults (DataReportal).

10. India is YouTube’s largest single country audience, with ad-planner reach approaching 500 million people (DataReportal).

11. The last specific user count YouTube published on its own press page was “over 2 billion logged-in users every month,” which this site cited in 2021. That page now says “billions of monthly logged-in users” with no number attached. Alphabet has published no monthly-active-user figure in any earnings filing before or since, which is why every newer number in circulation is an advertising-reach estimate.

Statistic 11 is the single most misused figure about YouTube. If you need a defensible audience number in 2026, use the ad-reach figure and say the words “advertising reach.” If you need a user number, the honest answer is that Google has not given one.

U.S. Adults and Teens

12. 84% of U.S. adults report ever using YouTube, ahead of Facebook at 71% and Instagram at 50% (Pew Research Center, 2025).

13. Only three platforms reach half or more of U.S. adults: YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. TikTok sits at 37% and WhatsApp at 32% (Pew, 2025).

14. Daily YouTube use is most common among adults aged 18 to 29 (Pew, 2025).

15. 90% of U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 use YouTube, making it the most widely used platform in that age group (Pew Research Center, Teens, Social Media and Technology 2024, n=1,391).

16. 73% of U.S. teens use YouTube daily, and 15% describe their use as “almost constant” (Pew, 2024).

17. Teen boys are more likely than teen girls to say they use YouTube almost constantly, at 19% versus 11% (Pew, 2024).

Teen YouTube use is down from 95% in 2022 to 90% in 2024. That is a real decline, and it is also small enough that Pew’s own methodology change makes it hard to read as a trend. I would not build a strategy on it in either direction.

Demographics

18. The average age of YouTube’s advertising audience falls in the 35 to 44 band, and men aged 25 to 34 are the largest single demographic segment (DataReportal, 2025).

19. YouTube’s Android app accounts for more time than any other social app, including more than the TikTok and Instagram Android apps combined, based on Sensor Tower app data cited in DataReportal’s Digital 2025 report. The measurement covers Android only.

YouTube Usage and Watch Time Statistics

The interesting shift in YouTube’s usage data over the last three years has nothing to do with mobile. It is that YouTube became a television network, measured by the company that measures television networks.

The Living Room Takeover

20. Viewers globally watch more than 1 billion hours of YouTube content on their TVs every day (Neal Mohan, 2024 letter).

21. YouTube’s share of U.S. television viewing time across the last eighteen months: 11.6% in February 2025, 12.4% in April, 13.4% in July, 12.9% in November, then 12.5% in January 2026, 13.2% in March, 13.4% in April and a platform-best 13.8% in May and June 2026. Nielsen does not print a YouTube figure in every monthly release, so the months above are the ones it published.

22. YouTube’s run at the top since February 2025 has one break in it. In February 2026 the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics put NBCUniversal-Versant first with 13.1% of TV. YouTube reclaimed the top spot in March (Nielsen).

23. Streaming as a whole took 48.5% of U.S. TV watch time in June 2026 (Nielsen).

24. In April 2025, YouTube held the top spot among media distributors for the third consecutive month (Nielsen). Time spent watching YouTube on television was up 53% against February 2023, when its share was 7.9% (Nielsen, February 2025 Gauge).

25. In July 2025, YouTube took 13.4% of TV watch time against second-place Disney’s 9.4%, a 4.0-point lead and the largest any media company had held since Nielsen launched the Media Distributor Gauge in November 2023 (Nielsen).

26. In May 2025, streaming as a whole reached 44.8% of U.S. television time, passing combined cable and broadcast viewing for the first time in Nielsen’s history (Nielsen).

27. YouTube has been the number one streamer in the United States for close to three consecutive years, per Nielsen data cited by Sundar Pichai (Alphabet Q4 2025 earnings call).

28. The number of top creators who get the majority of their watch time on the big screen grew more than 400% over the three years to early 2024 (Neal Mohan, 2024 letter).

Nielsen’s number is narrower than it looks, and it is worth knowing why before you quote it. The Gauge measures television screens only, so every minute of YouTube watched on a phone, a laptop or a tablet is invisible to it. YouTube TV viewing is also credited back to the linear networks it carries, not to YouTube. That does not automatically mean YouTube’s share of all video attention is higher, because the other screens carry competitors too. It does mean the 13.8% is a share of one screen, not of video.

Podcasts and News

29. In October 2025, viewers watched more than 700 million hours of podcasts on living-room devices, up 75% year over year (Alphabet Q4 2025 earnings call).

30. 30% of online news users across the 48 markets Reuters surveys used YouTube for news in the past week, second only to Facebook at 36% and ahead of Instagram and WhatsApp at 19%, TikTok at 16% and X at 12% (Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025, ~100,000 online respondents).

31. Across all markets, the share of people consuming social video for news rose from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025 (Reuters Institute, 2025).

32. 44% of surveyed 18 to 24 year olds say social media is their main source of news, against 38% of those aged 25 to 34 (Reuters Institute, 2025).

33. 65% of Gen Z viewers agree that content personally relevant to them matters more than content lots of other people talk about (YouTube Culture and Trends, 2022). Earlier versions of this page carried a 78% figure for the same finding across all viewers. That number could not be traced to any YouTube document, so the verified Gen Z figure replaces it.

Upload Volume

34. More than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. YouTube last stated this in February 2023 and has not revised it since, so treat it as a floor rather than a current measurement.

Statistic 34 is in this article because roughly half the YouTube articles on the internet quote it as if it were measured yesterday. It was not. It is also the last upload-rate figure YouTube has published, so cutting it entirely would leave a hole rather than fix one. Quote it with the date attached or not at all. If you write about video volume, the podcast and living-room numbers above are better evidence and they are three years fresher.

YouTube Shorts Statistics

Shorts is the part of YouTube where the numbers move fastest and where the measurement is least stable. Read the counting note under statistic 36 before you use any of these in a deck.

35. YouTube Shorts averages more than 200 billion views per day, announced 18 June 2025 (YouTube, Cannes 2025).

36. The comparable figure announced in February 2024 was 70 billion daily views. On 31 March 2025, between those two announcements, YouTube changed how it counts a Shorts view so that a swipe-by now counts, matching TikTok’s method. The 200 billion figure is measured under the new rule and the 70 billion figure under the old one, so the growth between them is not a like-for-like comparison.

37. Shorts ads accounted for roughly 21% of spend on traditional YouTube video campaigns in the fourth quarter of 2025, against 55% for skippable in-stream (Tinuiti Q4 2025 Digital Ads Benchmark Report).

38. 49% of Shorts ad spend went to television screens and 26% to mobile in the fourth quarter of 2025 (Tinuiti).

39. Veo 3 Fast, a custom version of Google DeepMind’s Veo 3, launched inside YouTube Shorts on 16 September 2025 in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, generating 480p clips with sound from text prompts (YouTube, Made On YouTube 2025).

40. YouTube’s auto dubbing is available to everyone across 27 languages as of February 2026, up from nine in June 2025, and it had dubbed more than 20 million videos in its first six months (Neal Mohan, Cannes 2025).

41. In several countries including the United States, Shorts now earns more revenue per watch hour than traditional in-stream YouTube, per Philipp Schindler on Alphabet’s Q4 2025 earnings call.

42. New Shorts creation features rolling out include applying motion from one video to a still photo, restyling a video in pop art, origami or paper styles, and adding objects from a text prompt (YouTube, Made On YouTube 2025).

Statistic 41 is the one that should change how you plan. For most of Shorts’ life the honest advice was that short-form on YouTube built audience and long-form paid for it. Alphabet is now saying, on the record, that in some markets the per-hour economics have flipped. That is a company claim rather than an audited figure, and Alphabet first made it on the Q3 2025 call in October 2025 and repeated it a quarter later, so it is a stated position rather than a one-off remark.

The practical read is narrower than it first looks. This is Alphabet’s revenue per watch hour, not a creator’s payout and not a margin, so it does not by itself tell you Shorts earns a channel more per hour. What it does say is that the platform no longer has a revenue reason to push everyone toward long-form. Our guide to promoting a YouTube channel covers how that changes the sequencing.

YouTube Revenue and Advertising Statistics

Alphabet does not report YouTube as a standalone segment, so there is no YouTube row in the quarterly revenue table beyond advertising. What exists is a YouTube advertising line inside Google Services, plus an annual combined ads-and-subscriptions figure that appears once a year in the CEO’s commentary and in the earnings exhibit. Both are below, labeled.

The Advertising Line

43. YouTube advertising revenue reached $11.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 9% year over year (Alphabet Q4 2025 results).

44. That 9% growth rate was dampened by lapping the 2024 U.S. election advertising cycle, per CFO Anat Ashkenazi (Alphabet Q4 2025 earnings call).

45. YouTube advertising revenue was $9.796 billion in the second quarter of 2025, against $8.663 billion in the second quarter of 2024, roughly 13% growth (Alphabet Q2 2025 results).

46. YouTube advertising revenue was $8.92 billion in the third quarter of 2024 (Alphabet Q3 2024 results).

47. Google Services revenue rose 14% to $95.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, of which Google Search and other was $63.1 billion, up 17% (Alphabet Q4 2025 results).

Subscriptions

48. Subscriptions, Platforms and Devices revenue was $13.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 17% year over year. That line includes YouTube Music, YouTube Premium, YouTube TV and NFL Sunday Ticket alongside Google One (Alphabet Q4 2025 results).

49. Alphabet has more than 325 million paid subscriptions across its consumer services, with growth led by YouTube Premium and Google One (Alphabet Q4 2025 earnings call).

50. YouTube Music and Premium reached 125 million subscribers globally, including trials, as of March 2025 (Lyor Cohen, YouTube), up from 100 million in January 2024 and 80 million in November 2022.

51. YouTube TV had more than 8 million paid subscribers as of February 2024, the last figure YouTube has formally disclosed (Neal Mohan, 2024 letter).

Statistic 51 is the stale one. YouTube has not published a YouTube TV subscriber count since February 2024, so anything more current you see quoted for that product is an analyst’s estimate. The Music and Premium number in statistic 50 is eighteen months fresher and comes straight from YouTube’s own blog.

What Advertisers Are Buying

52. Demand Gen ad spend grew 25% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2025, with impressions up 40% and CPMs down 11% (Tinuiti).

53. Video accounted for 66% of Demand Gen spend in the fourth quarter of 2025, up from 28% a year earlier, driven by the migration of Video Action Campaigns into Demand Gen (Tinuiti).

54. Google removed the option to create new Video Action Campaigns in April 2025, began automatically upgrading existing ones to Demand Gen in July 2025, and set April 2026 as the deadline for the final migrations (Google Ads Help). The original announcement gave earlier dates that Google later pushed back.

55. Advertisers running Demand Gen with both video and image assets saw 20% more conversions at the same cost per action than video-only campaigns, per Google’s own internal data (Google Ads, 2024).

56. Advertisers used Gemini to create close to 70 million creative assets through text customization in AI Max and Performance Max campaigns in the fourth quarter of 2025 (Alphabet Q4 2025 earnings call).

Statistic 55 is Google marketing its own product with unpublished test conditions. I have kept it because it is the only figure anyone has attached to the video-plus-image question, and because knowing that Google says 20% is useful even if you discount it. Statistics 52 and 53 come from Tinuiti’s own managed advertiser base, which skews toward mid-size and large performance advertisers in retail and e-commerce, and so do the Shorts spend figures in statistics 37 and 38. Tinuiti measures traditional YouTube video campaigns in that sample; Demand Gen inventory is counted separately and has a different Shorts share. If you run brand campaigns or a small budget, those benchmarks are not your benchmarks.

YouTube Creator Economy Statistics

The creator economy numbers are the most quoted and the least independent in this article. Almost all of them come from YouTube, or from research YouTube commissioned. That does not make them wrong. It does mean the definitions are chosen by the company that benefits from the answer, so the definitions are stated here alongside the figures.

Payouts and the Revenue Split

57. YouTube paid more than $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies over the four years from 2022 to 2025 (Neal Mohan, The Future of YouTube 2026).

58. The comparable figure for the three years from 2021 to 2023 was more than $70 billion (Neal Mohan, 2024 letter).

59. Creators earn 55% of the advertising and subscription revenue their content generates under the YouTube Partner Program (How YouTube Works). The two rates are calculated differently: Watch Page ads on long-form video pay 55% of net advertising revenue, while Shorts pays 45% of the creator’s allocated share of a pooled Shorts revenue fund, not 45% of the ads that ran on their own videos (YouTube Partner Program earnings).

60. The YouTube Partner Program had grown to more than 3 million channels by February 2024, up from 2 million in August 2021 (Neal Mohan, 2024 letter).

61. YouTube paid more than $6 billion to the music industry in the 12 months between July 2021 and June 2022, the last time it broke that figure out by period (YouTube). Lyor Cohen repeated the figure in February 2024 without giving a newer window.

The 55% revenue share in statistic 59 is the single most actionable number in this section, and it is the one people most often replace with a made-up RPM. YouTube publishes the split. It does not publish revenue per thousand views, and anyone quoting a specific dollar RPM as a platform-wide figure is quoting an aggregation of creator self-reports, not a YouTube disclosure. If you are working out what a channel can earn, our YouTube monetization guide works from the split rather than from a borrowed RPM.

Economic Contribution

62. YouTube’s creative ecosystem contributed $55 billion to U.S. GDP in 2024 (Oxford Economics for YouTube, June 2025).

63. It supported the equivalent of 490,000 full-time U.S. jobs in 2024 (Oxford Economics for YouTube, 2025).

64. Equivalent 2024 figures for other markets, each published as its own report: £2.2 billion and more than 45,000 jobs in the United Kingdom, more than €7 billion and more than 200,000 full-time-equivalent jobs across the European Union, and CA$1.8 billion and more than 35,000 jobs in Canada.

65. Oxford Economics defines a “creative entrepreneur” as an individual or business with 10,000 or more subscribers on their largest channel, or a smaller creator who earns money directly or indirectly from YouTube or permanently employs others (Oxford Economics methodology).

Statistic 65 is the reason statistics 62 through 64 need reading carefully. The definition is not a flat 10,000-subscriber cutoff, but it does anchor on that threshold and then adds smaller creators only where they earn money or employ people, so a hobby channel with 200 subscribers is outside the model. The total payout that anchors the model was also supplied by YouTube and is not independently auditable. Oxford Economics says so in its own methodology, which is more than most vendor-sponsored research does.

I would still use these numbers. I would just say “Oxford Economics, commissioned by YouTube” out loud every time, the way you would with any sponsored research. Our influencer marketing statistics page has the same problem across a wider set of vendors, and the same fix.

YouTube AI Statistics

YouTube shipped generative AI into the creation flow in 2025 and started reporting adoption in 2026. These are the first numbers the company has put behind that.

66. More than 1 million channels used YouTube’s AI creation tools on an average day in December 2025 (Alphabet Q4 2025 earnings call).

67. More than 20 million viewers used the Gemini-powered “Ask” tool on YouTube during December 2025 (Alphabet Q4 2025 earnings call).

68. YouTube introduced a Creator Studio disclosure tool on 18 March 2024 requiring creators to label realistic content made with altered or synthetic media. Labels appear in the description, and on the player itself for sensitive topics including elections, health and finance (YouTube).

69. Disclosure is not required for clearly unrealistic or animated content, for productivity uses such as script generation and captions, or for inconsequential changes such as color correction and beauty filters (YouTube, 2024).

70. There are four ways the altered-content label gets applied: creator disclosure in YouTube Studio, YouTube applying it proactively, use of YouTube’s own generative tools, and valid C2PA Content Credentials on the file (Google Support).

71. Individuals can request removal of AI-generated or synthetic content that depicts a realistic version of their likeness or voice, under YouTube’s privacy guidelines rather than its Community Guidelines (YouTube Privacy Complaint Process).

Neal Mohan’s 2026 priorities letter names fighting AI “slop” as an explicit goal alongside expanding AI creation tools, which is a harder position to hold than it reads. YouTube has now shipped the tools that make the slop and the labels that flag it, and it has published no enforcement volumes for either. There is no statistic here because the company has not produced one.

What These YouTube Statistics Mean for Marketers

Three of the figures above should change how you plan, and the rest are context.

The first is the television share. YouTube is not a social platform competing with Instagram for a phone screen anymore, it is the largest single distributor of television viewing in the United States. If your video is shot for a 6-inch screen and your thumbnails are designed to win a scroll, you are optimizing for the part of the audience that is growing slowest.

The second is the Shorts revenue-per-hour claim. It is a company statement rather than an audited number, and it is about Alphabet’s revenue rather than a creator’s earnings, so treat it as a signal about where the platform’s incentives now sit rather than as a promise about your own channel.

The third is what is missing. There is no published monthly-active-user count, no published RPM, no published enforcement volume for AI labels. Every number filling those gaps in other articles is an estimate wearing a citation. Naming the gap is more useful to a client than filling it with something confident and wrong.

For the wider video picture beyond YouTube, our video marketing statistics page covers formats, budgets and buyer behavior across platforms, and our podcast statistics page picks up the audio side that YouTube’s living-room podcast numbers now overlap with. If the question is earnings rather than reach, start with how to make money on YouTube.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is YouTube Growing or Declining?

Growing, on every measure YouTube or Alphabet actually discloses. Advertising revenue rose 9% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2025 to $11.4 billion, full-year revenue across ads and subscriptions passed $60 billion, and YouTube’s share of U.S. television viewing went from 11.6% in February 2025 to 13.8% in June 2026. That climb is not a straight line: the share dipped to 12.5% in January 2026 before recovering. The one soft spot is U.S. teen adoption, which Pew measured at 90% in 2024 against 95% in 2022.

How Many People Use YouTube?

Nobody outside Google knows. Alphabet has never disclosed YouTube’s monthly active users in an earnings release or an annual filing. The most defensible public figure is advertising reach: 2.53 billion people as of January 2025, per figures Google publishes in its own ad planning tools and compiled by DataReportal. YouTube’s last self-reported user figure was “over 2 billion logged-in users every month,” which it has not refreshed.

How Much Does YouTube Pay per 1,000 Views?

YouTube does not publish a rate. What it publishes is the split: creators keep 55% of net Watch Page advertising revenue under the Partner Program, and 45% of their allocated share of the pooled Shorts revenue fund. Every per-thousand-view dollar figure you see is either an average of creator self-reports or an estimate, and the real number varies enormously by niche, country and format. Treat the revenue share as the fact and everything else as a range.

What Share of U.S. TV Viewing Does YouTube Have?

13.8% in June 2026, the largest share of any media distributor, per Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge. That measures television screens only. Phone, tablet and desktop viewing is excluded, and viewing through the YouTube TV app is credited to the linear networks it carries rather than to YouTube. Read it as a share of television, not as a share of all video.

How Big Is YouTube Shorts?

More than 200 billion views per day as of June 2025. The comparison to the 70 billion figure from February 2024 is not clean, because YouTube changed its view-counting rule on 31 March 2025 so that a swipe-by counts as a view. On the money side, Shorts took about 21% of YouTube video ad spend in the fourth quarter of 2025, and about half of that spend ran on television screens.

Sources and Methodology

Every figure above traces to the organization that produced the underlying data. Company disclosures come from Alphabet’s SEC filings and earnings call transcripts or from YouTube’s official blog and Help Center. Independent measurement comes from Nielsen, Pew Research Center and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Vendor-sponsored research is used where no independent equivalent exists, and is labeled as such at the point of use.

Figures are current as of 8 September 2026. Where a source has not been updated since its publication date, that date is stated inline rather than implied to be current.

What Was Excluded and Why

The widely-circulated “2.7 billion monthly active users” and “2.5 billion monthly active users” figures were excluded. Neither can be traced to an Alphabet earnings filing, a 10-K or a YouTube announcement. They originate from third-party analysis of advertising reach. The advertising-reach figure is reported in its place, labeled as advertising reach.

Creator-economy forecasts from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were excluded because the underlying research notes are client-only and cannot be linked as primary sources.

Specific cost-per-thousand-impression benchmarks in dollars were excluded. Google does not publish CPM benchmarks, and the ranges circulating in marketing articles cannot be traced to a single primary document. Tinuiti’s directional benchmarks are used instead, with its client-base limitation stated.

The Linktree Creator Report and similar self-selected creator surveys were excluded on sample-quality grounds.

An earlier draft of this article treated the 125 million YouTube Music and Premium figure as journalist-reported. It is not. Lyor Cohen’s March 2025 letter is published on YouTube’s own blog and states the figure directly, so it is used here as the current number, with the 100 million and 80 million figures kept alongside it as the earlier milestones.

On the Figures That Have Not Been Updated

Three numbers in this article are older than the rest and are kept deliberately: the 500-hours-per-minute upload rate, the 8 million YouTube TV subscribers, and the 2 billion logged-in monthly users. In each case YouTube published the figure, has not published a replacement, and the figure remains the most authoritative one available. The 70 billion daily Shorts views from February 2024 appear too, but as the superseded half of a then-and-now pair rather than as a current figure. Each is stated with its date. Earlier versions of this page carried a set of 2020 pandemic-era figures covering live-stream growth, new-channel creation and fitness viewing, sourced to YouTube’s internal data and to a Social Media Examiner industry report. Those were removed in a 2022 revision of this page and are not reinstated here, because no source has published a comparable current measurement.