YouTube ads printed so much money for Google in the last quarter

YouTube ads are some of the most important cornerstones in Google’s business. You know, those unskippable ones that you always come across when trying to watch something. Apparently, it printed so much money for Google in the last quarter.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has recently posted its latest quarterly earning reports, which reveal a strong ad revenue in Q4 2024. YouTube played a big part on that, with its advertising revenue reaching $10.47 billion, surpassing Wall Street’s $10.23 billion estimate.

In a more overall sense, Alphabet’s ad business brought in $72.46 billion, accounting for 75% of its total revenue and setting a new record compared to the previous quarter despite a small slowdown in YouTube ad growth compared to last year.

“Our results show the power of our differentiated full-stack approach to AI innovation and the continued strength of our core businesses,” Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai says.

“We are confident about the opportunities ahead, and to accelerate our progress, we expect to invest approximately $75 billion in capital expenditures in 2025,” he continues.

Google has been waging wars against adblockers on YouTube for quite some time now by slapping you with a full-blown warning message that you may not be able to access YouTube if you continue with an adblock, or purchase a YouTube Premium subscription.

The popular video-sharing platform also started testing server-side ad injection, a method that embeds ads directly into videos to bypass traditional ad blockers like uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock some time ago.

On Google Chrome, the company also deprecated Manifest v2 extensions, which also counts for the popular uBlock Origin. Though, some other browsers like Opera and Firefox still enable that, or even have their own built-in ad blockers.