YouTube prints $50 billion in revenue in the past four quarters but still vows to fight adblockers

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has recently announced its Q3 earnings for 2024, covering the months of July to September. And for the first time in history, YouTube’s total ads and subscription revenues surpassed $50 billion over the past four quarters.

YouTube, which Google bought in 2006 for “only” $1.65 billion, now become the company’s staple product that leads the revenue stream alongside other services like Google Cloud, Google Play, and Search. The popular video-sharing platform also gets new AI, with Veo, its text-to-video AI, coming to Shorts later this year.

“We’re leaning into the living room experience with multiview, and a new option for creators to organize content into episodes and seasons, similar to traditional TV,” Google says in the announcement.

But still, that does not stop Google from waging wars against adblockers (well, that’s how they made the money). Google has been warning users from using adblockers on YouTube, with some even reporting that it disabled video playback for users using such an extension.

And just weeks ago, we also reported that uBlock Origin, a Manifest v2 extension, has now officially been phased out from Chrome. A lot of folks have started shifting to its “lite” version with Manifest v3, but it’s still not as good, although other browsers like Opera One still support it.

The company also says that it’s reached $88.3 billion in consolidated revenues for this quarter, which is a 15% year-over-year increase.

As the race for the cloud industry intensifies, Google Cloud’s revenue saw a 35% jump, driven by growth in AI infrastructure and generative AI solutions. The parent company’s operating income also increased by 34%, with an operating margin expansion of 4.5 percentage points to 32%