Google said today that YouTube now has more than 100 million paid users across YouTube Music and YouTube Premium. This number is up from the 80 million paid users the company mentioned in November 2022.
Earlier this week, during its Q4 2023 earnings call, Sundar Pichai said that Google’s subscription business — which includes YouTube’s paid plans — has now crossed $15 billion annually.
The company’s chief business officer Philipp Schindler said that premium users are providing more value to its partners.
“YouTube Music and Premium performed well. Premium users are delivering more value to our partners and YouTube than even ad-supported users do. On average, each additional Premium sign-up boosts earnings for creators, music and media partners, and YouTube itself,” he said.
The search giant first launched YouTube Music in 2015. At that time, YouTube offered a $9.99 per month Red subscription for ad-free viewing that also allowed users to access Play Music. In 2018, the Red subscription was rebranded to YouTube Premium.
In the past year, YouTube has cracked down on ad blockers by saying that these tools violate its terms of service. The video streaming service started to show a warning about preventing them from watching videos unless they disable ad blockers.
In the last few years, it also experimented with asking users to pay to watch videos in higher resolution or showed multiple unskippable ads.
Separately, the company has launched features like mini-games and video with enhanced bitrate to make the Premium version more attractive for users.
YouTube has expanded its Premium subscription in over 100 countries. In December 2023, the company expanded the offering to 10 more countries, including Algeria, Cambodia, Ghana, Iraq, Joran, Kenya and Senegal.
YouTube is a big part of Google’s business and it garnered $9.2 billion in Q4 2023 — up from $8 billion for the same period last year.