YouTube wants to look a little more like Netflix... Netflix feels the same

YouTube has made billions from ads. Now, it keeps exploring ways for users to pay to see fewer of them.

According to Bloomberg, the streaming giant is planning to roll out a cheaper, ad-free subscription tier called “Premium Lite” in several markets, including the US and Australia. For less than the current $13.99/month price, users can ditch ads on most content — music videos being the crucial exception.

The move makes sense, given YouTube’s deep reliance on advertising: in 2024, it pulled in a staggering $36 billion from ads alone, just shy of Netflix’s entire $39 billion haul. That’s even before factoring in what YouTube makes from its more than 100 million Premium and Music subscribers.

While Alphabet doesn’t reveal the exact splits between YouTube’s ads and subscription revenues, the company revealed last year that YouTube’s total revenue topped $50 billion for the first time during the 12 months ending Q3 2024. Some quick math shows that 70% of sales came from ads, with the remaining ~30% from subscriptions. Two weeks ago, YouTube hit another major milestone, saying that more people now watch YouTube on TV than on phones — further evidence that YouTube, rather than Disney or Amazon, might be Netflix’s stiffest competition for attention after all.

Of course, while YouTube is going after subscribers, Netflix is making moves in the opposite direction.

Once famously anti-ads (cofounder Reed Hastings once criticized ads for “exploiting users”), Netflix changed course in 2022, launching a cheaper, ad-supported tier after suffering its largest-ever subscriber loss. Two years later, over 55% of new sign-ups in ad-supported regions now opt for this ad-backed plan.

Still, ads are “not a material component” of Netflix’s total revenue, per its latest annual report. But the subscription juggernaut expects its ad business to “transition from crawl to walk” in 2025, Co-CEO Gregory Peters said during last month’s earnings call.