For the time since it acquired YouTube in 2006, Google disclosed YouTube numbers in its earnings call. YouTube ads raked in $4.7 billion in revenues in Q4 2019, and a total of $15.1 billion in 2019. YouTube Music and YouTube Premium (ad-free YouTube) have 20 million subscribers, and YouTube TV has 2 million paid subscribers. Revenues from these subscriptions products are bundled into "other" revenues, which stood at $5.2 billion this quarter and include Google Home speakers and Pixel phone. Ad revenue from the video platform has grown at 35% for the past two fiscal years, from $8 billion in 2017, to $11 billion in 2018, and finally $15 billion in 2019. YouTube ads' contribution to Google's revenues has gradually been increasing from around 7% in 2017 to just a little over 9% in 2019. When asked about YouTube's payments strategy, Sundar Pichai, who took over as Alphabet CEO from Google's co-founders in December, said that payments play a critical role and work better when there's minimal friction. "We've had a lot of traction with our payments product over the past 18 months." "We had a tremendously successful launch in India from which we learnt a lot of features, and we are bringing that and we are revamping our payments products globally." — Sundar Pichai YouTube launched its subscription services — music streaming service YouTube Music Premium and YouTube Premium (basically ad-free YouTube) — in India in March 2019. YouTube Premium also includes access to YouTube original programming. The music streaming service…
