YouTube Now Has 20 Million Music and Premium Paid Subscribers, Google Reveals

Google-owned YouTube has reached 20 million music and premium paid subscribers and over 2 million YouTube TV paid subscribers. YouTube ended 2019 at a $3 billion annual run rate in YouTube subscriptions and other non-advertising revenues, Alphabet Founder and CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Monday.

YouTube logged $15 billion in annual ad revenue - a 35.8 percent growth over the prior year. For Q4 2019, YouTube reported revenue of $4.17 billion.

"On the YouTube side, all our user metrics are very strong. They're global in nature and increasingly we see newer verticals beginning to grow as well. So, YouTube is working horizontally well at scale. And for us, it's making sure, as an ecosystem, it works better so that the content there, the experiences there are improving," Pichai told analysts during an earnings call.

People can now easily buy products in YouTube's home feed and search results making it possible for advertisers to reach even more audiences.

"Try searching for Puma shoes review on YouTube to see an example. With all the related content on YouTube like unboxing and beauty videos, this is the format people love and it delivers a simple in-video buying experience," said Pichai.

Google added as many buildings to Google Maps using machine learning (ML) in 2019 as it added using all techniques in the previous decade, Pichai also revealed.

"In Maps, we are celebrating our 15th anniversary very soon and in the past year we brought reliable directions to 630 million additional people in locations that previously weren't well-mapped," informed Pichai.

With all these improvements user growth is strong and the range of things people are doing with Google Maps continues to expand as well.

"The Google Assistant now helps more than 500 million monthly users across 90 counties to get things done, across smart speakers and smart displays, phones, TVs, cars and more," he said.

Pichai announced that over $80 billion has been earned by developers around the world from Google Play. There are now over 2 billion active monthly users of Google Play.

Hardware, however, is still in the early stages of delivering on Google's vision for ambient computing.

"Our home devices demonstrate how this vision can come to life in creating the home of the future with our new Nest Mini and Nest Hub Max selling well over the holidays, following on from the Pixel 3a, which sold well last year.

"With Pixel 4, we continue to build out our capabilities and are keenly focused on execution delivering great user experiences and broadening our distribution, and our pending acquisition of Fitbit will give us a foundation in variables," said Pichai.