YouTube Music and YouTube Premium now have a combined total of 80 million paying subscribers.
This generates roughly $960 million in revenue each month for YouTube, and $11b per year, without having to rely on ads.
Although this is still a small percentage of YouTube's total revenue, it is still an impressive amount.
This is up from the 50 million that they announced in September of last year. So that's quite a bit of growth for YouTube. It's likely that this growth is due to adding more pre-roll, mid-roll, and longer ads.
YouTube Music is in third place behind Spotify and Apple Music, which is pretty impressive. However, keep in mind that some services will include free trials in these numbers, so the numbers may not be completely accurate.
This is just the latest in a series of signs that users are willing to pay for a service to get an ad-free experience.
With 80 million people using YouTube without ads, it's clear that this is something that people value.
We've seen this same trend with other streaming services like Discovery+, Paramount+, and others. People are willing to spend a little extra money each month to be able to enjoy content without ads.
YouTube Premium is a subscription service that offers ad-free YouTube, in addition to downloading for offline playback and background playback.
YouTube Music is also included in the subscription, so, for a couple of dollars more than Spotify, YouTube Premium could be considered worth paying for.
It is also worth noting that, even though the 80 million number is large, it is only a small portion of YouTube's 2.6 billion monthly active users.
