YouTube now has 150 million paying subscribers across YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. That is a sharp jump from the 100 million milestone the service hit in early 2024. The subscription business lifted Google’s overall subscription revenue by 11% in the third quarter. However, the real story behind this growth is the shift of viewers to the big screen.
Alphabet executives credited Connected TV, or CTV, for most of this momentum. Google Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler said Living Room, YouTube’s TV app experience, now accounts for more than one-third of total YouTube ad revenue. In other words, Living Room has become a serious revenue engine on its own.
As per Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, praising YouTube:
On to YouTube. Month after month, when a big event happens in the world, the world turns to YouTube. It’s been incredible to see that over 1.7 billion unique viewers globally watched World Cup‑related videos on YouTube during the FIFA World Cup 2026.
We are also bringing the power of conversational AI directly into the YouTube experience. Ask YouTube uses our Gemini models to let people ask complex questions about individual videos, get quick takeaways, and jump straight to moments in those videos. The early engagement is encouraging. More than 140 million users engaged with Ask YouTube on the watch page in June 2026. And we’re bringing that Ask experience to the wider search experience on YouTube.
On the ad side, YouTube brought in $11.2 billion during Q3 2026. That figure grew 9% year on year, slower than the 13% rate in Q2. The slowdown worried some investors, yet the CTV expansion offers a longer runway. Schindler added that creators upload more than 20 million videos every day, which keeps the content pipeline flowing.
Creator economics continue to scale. More than 3 million creators are now in the YouTube Partner Program, while over 1.3 million channels have joined the shopping program. For creators chasing TV screen reach, the Living Room shift matters because viewers spend more time per session there than on mobile.
Nielsen’s The Gauge report from August 2026 ranked YouTube as the top streaming platform in the US. The ranking placed it ahead of Netflix, Disney, and other paid services. This TV takeover reflects how people, especially younger ones, treat YouTube as a full replacement for cable.
