Photo Credit: Zulfugar Karimov
YouTube Music and Premium cracked a total of 150 million worldwide subscribers during Q3 2026, when “living room” viewing made up more than one-third of YouTube’s advert revenue.
Alphabet revealed these and other noteworthy performance figures in its third-quarter earnings report this afternoon. Beginning with the Music and Premium subscriber milestone, the figure includes trials and represents an increase of 25 million from March 2025.
During that same stretch, Spotify reported netting 38 million subscribers (to 306 million as of 2026’s third quarter). However, hard numbers don’t necessarily tell the full story given the platforms’ intense video-podcast competition as well as YouTube’s larger overall reach, to name a couple factors.
Running with the latter point, DMN Pro’s been tracking YouTube Music subscriber gains throughout 2026; the platform’s total stateside subs spiked by north of 45% year over year during the first quarter.
Put differently, Music’s gains are partially attributable to strong results in the all-important U.S. market – a fact worth keeping in mind as the Google-owned service targets continued subscriber-base expansions with fresh features, different plans, and more.
Alphabet also identified Q3 2026 ads growth for YouTube, to the tune of a 9.2% YoY revenue bump to $11.2 billion. And bearing in mind video podcasting’s aforesaid significance, “living room” viewing accounted for over one-third of the total, per Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler.
“Living room accounted for over one-third of total YouTube ads revenues,” Schindler elaborated during the earnings call.
That attracting viewers is to some extent a (content) numbers game hasn’t been lost on Spotify, which kicked off 2026 by dramatically lowering its monetization thresholds for creators and has been leaning into music videos as of late. But to reiterate the obvious, YouTube has a sizable content-volume advantage with its 20 million daily video uploads.
Moreover, YouTube is reportedly plotting an entry into audiobooks, an area where Spotify says it’s recording material growth. Simultaneously, the Stockholm-based platform is investing in video podcast series – or television shows, as they were formerly known.
Finally, in terms of key takeaways from Alphabet’s third-quarter report, Google subscriptions, platforms, and devices achieved an 11% YoY revenue improvement to $14.3 billion.
The results were “driven by strong growth in YouTube subscriptions, particularly in YouTube Music and Premium, and strong demand for AI plans in Google One,” Google and Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi indicated.
Elsewhere in the report, Alphabet pointed to $128 billion in across-the-board third-quarter revenue, up 25% YoY, and a net income decline to roughly $26 billion.
At the time of this writing, Alphabet shares (NASDAQ: GOOG) were down almost 10% in after-hours trading at about $290 apiece.
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