YouTube ads made over $36B in 2024 amid war on adblockers

YouTube’s war against ad blockers has apparently paid off, as the platform reportedly raked in over $36 billion last year in advertisements alone.

YouTube is one of the most popular video-sharing platforms on the net, boasting over 2.5 billion global monthly users as of January 2025.

In 2024, the website made several major advertisement-related changes to its service, one of which focused on preventing viewers from using ad blockers to skip straight to a video without paying for Premium.

After testing the feature in late 2023 (much to users’ chagrin), YouTube waged war against ad blockers by injecting them directly into videos and even implemented pause-screen advertisements on Smart TVs.

Users also noticed that YouTube was seemingly hiding the ‘skip ad’ button on its mobile app, along with the length of advertisements in October 2024 — an aggressive move against users hoping to bypass lengthy commercials.

YouTube rakes in billions from ad revenue alone

These changes weren’t for nothing, as the platform reportedly raked in a whopping $36 billion in advertisement revenue over the entirety of 2024.

As discovered by StreamTV Insider, the platform earned a record-breaking $10.473 billion in Q4 2024 — the first time it’s surpassed the $10B mark in a single quarter.

This number doesn’t include earnings from Premium and YouTube TV subscriptions, either, which has garnered over 9 million subscribers at the time of publication.

In Fall 2024, parent company Alphabet reported that it had gained $50 billion in revenue across both YouTube’s ad-friendly and subscription services in the 12-month period ending on September 30, another big first for the business.

This is just the latest big news from YouTube after the platform began testing a new feature called the ‘Play Something’ button in December 2024, which aims to help bored users navigate to content they might want to watch if nothing looks interesting in their recommended feed.