YouTube is now the world's largest media company, and it is only getting bigger

By Lukas I. Alpert YouTube's 2025 revenue topped even Disney's media properties and is poised for ongoing growth both in advertising and subscriptions, MoffettNathanson says YouTube generated the most revenue of any media company in 2025, besting Disney for the first time, according to MoffettNathanson Research. That's a lot of cat videos. YouTube has been crowned the world's largest media company, riding a years-long wave of user-generated videos - including millions of cat videos - to surge past even Walt Disney in revenue last year. The video-streaming service, which is owned by Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) (GOOGL), took the top spot last year with $62.3 billion in revenue, according to data compiled by MoffettNathanson Research, narrowly beating out the $60.9 billion brought in by Disney's (DIS) media properties. Unlike many media companies that are facing major shifts in audience habits, challenges brought by artificial intelligence and declines in many revenue categories, YouTube should be able to keep growing for the foreseeable future, analyst Michael Nathanson said. "In a world filled with business model concerns, YouTube's global scale and innovative offerings create an uncommonly high moat," he wrote in a note to clients, meaning the company is insulated from competition and from other factors. Nathanson valued YouTube at between $500 billion and $560 billion if it were a standalone company. In its fourth-quarter earnings report, Alphabet said YouTube "exceeded $60 billion" in revenue for the year but wasn't more specific than that. MoffettNathanson's analysis leaves aside revenue generated by Disney's theme parks and cruise businesses, which brought in $32.6 billion in its 2025 fiscal year. YouTube had already captured the lead spot in terms of audience share: January marked the 11th month in a row that YouTube topped Nielsen's distributor index, with 12.5% of the total aggregated audience among major media companies, after passing Disney last February. At a recent congressional hearing on Netflix's ultimately failed bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), Netflix (NFLX) CEO Ted Sarandos said that more than half of YouTube's audience now watches it on television, rather than solely on their phones. "YouTube is not just cat videos anymore. YouTube is TV," he said, arguing against concerns that Netflix's acquisition of Warner Bros. would be anticompetitive. Netflix eventually walked away from its $82.3 billion bid when Paramount Skydance (PSKY) came in with a higher offer of $110 billion. Nathanson said in his note that, on a pro forma basis, the combined 2025 revenue of Paramount and Warner Bros. would have come in on top at $66.2 billion. But "given the vastly different growth rates between assets, that title appears to be short-lived" after the two are eventually combined. YouTube has achieved such rapid revenue growth through a dual-revenue model made up of its free, ad-supported platform and its premium subscription platforms: YouTubeTV, YouTube Premium and NFL Sunday Ticket. Nearly a third of YouTube's revenue now comes from its subscription products, while advertising on its free platform generated over $40 billion in revenue last year, MoffettNathanson tabulated. Despite reaching the top spot, MoffettNathanson said YouTube actually saw its revenue growth decline slightly from the year before, rising 14% in 2025 compared with 19% in 2024. While Roku and Netflix both saw higher revenue growth percentages, at 18% and 16%, respectively, YouTube still topped all other media companies, with Fox's 9% growth being the next closest. MoffettNathanson said that unlike many of its competitors, YouTube is well positioned to "be a major beneficiary of both the structural tailwinds and headwinds facing technology and media companies." "The continued development of GenAI will help creators produce even more impactful content that will be increasingly better targeted and better monetized by other AI tools," Michael Nathanson's note read. MoffettNathanson rates Alphabet as a buy, with a target price of $350 per share. -Lukas I. Alpert This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal. (END) Dow Jones Newswires 03-09-26 1627ET