Alphabet, the company behind Google and YouTube, has unveiled strong results for the financial quarter ended June 30, 2025. Overall, Alphabet revenues rose by 14%, year over year to $96.4 billion “reflecting robust momentum across the business”.
Several segments of the business performed strongly with YouTube’s ad revenue for the quarter coming in ahead of estimates at $9.8 billion. In another strong indicator for the video sharing platform, YouTube also made up 12.8% of all TV viewing in the US during June 2025, well ahead of SVOD platform Netflix in second at 8.3%.
Sundar Pichai, CEO (pictured), called it “a standout quarter, with robust growth across the company. We are leading at the frontier of AI and shipping at an incredible pace. AI is impacting every part of the business, driving strong momentum. Search delivered double-digit growth, and new features, like AI Overviews and AI Mode, are performing well. We continue to see strong performance in YouTube as well as subscriptions offerings. And Cloud had strong growth in revenues, backlog and profitability”.
Following the release of the results, Pichai and the Alphabet team spoke to investors on a conference call. During this call, Pichai talked up the performance of YouTube Shorts: “In the US, Shorts now earn as much revenue per watch hour as traditional in-stream on YouTube, and in some countries, it now even exceeds in-stream’s rate. We now average over 200 billion daily views on YouTube Shorts.”
He added that: “AI is helping improve our recommendations and (there is also) Auto Dubbing, which translates to better returns for creators and brands by dramatically increasing the potential audiences they can reach. And today, we began rolling out a whole raft of new AI tools for creators on YouTube Shorts”.
Turning to YouTube’s increasing stranglehold over streaming watch time, Pichai said: “A generation that grew up with YouTube on their devices is now watching their favourite creators and content on TV. That includes billions of sports fans, too. Globally they consume more than 40 billion hours of sports content on YouTube annually. And in September, we’ll stream the NFL’s first Friday game of the season, live from Brazil.”
Pichai said that the platform also “continues to diversify its subscription options, expanding its Premium Lite offerings to 15 new countries, with more to come”.
Asked about the relative merits of ads vs subscriptions, Philipp Schindler, SVP and CBO, Google, said: “We love our ads business. We love our subscription business. YouTube subscriptions (YouTube TV, YouTube Music, and Premium) are increasingly important for YouTube. We’ll definitely continue a long-term focus here. I think one common theme for our subscription services is offering viewers more choice.”
Schindler continued: “We have a deep understanding of the monetisation side here: Where are we monetising more with ads? Where can we potentially monetise more with subscriptions? I think we will continue this as a double-tier strategy going forward.”
