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

YouTube’s latest move shows it’s doubling down on subscriptions, while Netflix wants a piece of its ad game.

2/24/25 11:22AM

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.

The most outlandish tech CEO quotes from 2025

Tech CEOs have been nuttier than ever.

Rani Molla3h

Rani Molla4h

Trump AI executive order is a “major win” for Open AI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, says Ives

President Trump’s new executive order aiming to keep states from enacting AI laws that inhibit US “global AI dominance” is a “major win” for OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. Big Tech companies have collectively plowed hundreds of billions into the technology, while seeing massive stock price gains, and Ives believes they stand to gain much more.

“Given that there have been over 1,000 AI laws proposed at the state level, this was a necessary move by the Trump Administration to keep the US out in front for the AI Revolution over China,” Ives wrote, adding that state-by-state regulation “would have crushed US AI startup culture.” The presidential order would withhold federal funds from states that put in place onerous AI regulations.

This morning, Whitehouse AI adviser Sriram Krishnan said in a CNBC interview that he’d be working with Congress on a single national framework for AI.

Despite Ives’ rosy read-through on the order, with the exception of Nvidia, which jumped on a report of boosted Chinese demand, many AI stocks are in the red early today. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF is down nearly 1% premarket, as the AI trade struggles thanks to underwhelming earnings results from Oracle earlier this week.

Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence

This morning, Whitehouse AI adviser Sriram Krishnan said in a CNBC interview that he’d be working with Congress on a single national framework for AI.

Rani Molla23h

Epic scores two victories as “Fortnite” returns to Google Play and appeals court keeps injunction against Apple

“Fortnite” maker Epic Games notched two wins Thursday in its drawn-out battle against Big Tech’s app stores. “Fortnite” returned to the Google Play app store in the US, Reuters reports, as Epic continues working with Google to secure court approval for their settlement.

Meanwhile, a US appeals court partly reversed sanctions against Apple in Epic’s antitrust case, calling parts of the order overly broad, but upheld the contempt finding and left a sweeping injunction in place — keeping pressure on Apple to allow developers to steer users to outside payment options and reduce its tight control over how apps can communicate and monetize on iOS.

So many reasons to drop in this month... and now we're on Google Play in the U.S. too!

Android: https://t.co/Z6pkYqYsRI
iPhone: https://t.co/JNpTVneGMN
PC: https://t.co/CPsjp3XNdo pic.twitter.com/TV9b1ZlqfJ
— Fortnite (@Fortnite) December 11, 2025

Jon Keegan23h

Report: AI-powered toys tell kids where to find matches, parrot Chinese government propaganda

You may want to think twice before buying your kids a fancy AI-powered plush toy.

A new report from NBC News found that several AI-powered kids toys could easily be steered to dangerous as well as sexually explicit conversations in a shocking demonstration of the loose safety guardrails in this novel category of consumer electronics.

A report out by the Public Interest Research Group details what researchers found when they tested five AI-powered toys for kids bought from Amazon. Some of the toys offered instructions on where to find matches and how to start fires.

NBC News also bought some of these toys and found they parroted Chinese government propaganda and gave instructions for how to sharpen knives. Some of the toys also discussed inappropriate topics for kids, like sexual kinks.

The category of AI-powered kids toys is under scrutiny as major AI companies like OpenAI have announced partnerships with toy manufacturers like Mattel (which has yet to release an AI-powered toy).

AI toys for kids talk about sex and issue Chinese Communist Party talking points, tests show

The category of AI-powered kids toys is under scrutiny as major AI companies like OpenAI have announced partnerships with toy manufacturers like Mattel (which has yet to release an AI-powered toy).

Jon Keegan23h

OpenAI releases GPT-5.2, the “best model yet for real-world, professional use”

After feeling the heat from Google’s recent launch of its powerful Gemini 3 model, OpenAI’s response to its “code red” has been released, reportedly on an accelerated schedule to keep up with the competition.

The company’s new flagship model, GPT-5.2, is out, and the company is calling it “the most capable model series yet for professional knowledge work.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it the “smartest generally-available model in the world” and shared benchmarks that showed it achieving higher scores than Gemini 3 Pro and Anthopic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in some software engineering tests and abstract reasoning, math, and science problems.

In a press release announcing the new model, the company said: “Overall, GPT‑5.2 brings significant improvements in general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision — making it better at executing complex, real-world tasks end-to-end than any previous model.”