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Video giant YouTube, one of the world’s biggest entertainment businesses, continues to turn in double-digit increases in ad revenue.
YouTube posted ad sales of $11.06 billion for the second quarter of 2026, up 12.6%
year over year. The results exceeded Wall Street analysts expectations for ad revenue of $10.8 billion, per StreetAccount. That doesn’t include YouTube’s billions of dollars in subscription revenue; in 2025, total YouTube revenue topped $60 billion, according to parent company Alphabet.
Overall, Alphabet, which is also the parent of Google, posted Q2 revenue of $119.8 billion (up 24%) and net income of $112.1 billion (up nearly fourfold), or $9.11 per share, smashing analyst estimates. The company’s Q2 net income included a whopping $99 billion net gain on equity securities during the period; Alphabet’s holdings include investments in Anthropic and SpaceX.
In announcing the earnings, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, commented that “month over month, people turn to YouTube for major world events, with over 1.7 billion unique viewers watching World Cup-related videos during the FIFA World Cup 2026.”
Providing a big boost to Alphabet’s top line was Google Cloud, where Q2 revenue jumped 82%, to $24.77 billion. That was “driven by demand for AI infrastructure and AI solutions,” Pichai said. Operating income in the Google Cloud segment tripled, to $8.81 billion.
Alphabet’s capital expenditures doubled in the quarter, to $44.9 billion, as the company continued to heavily invest in building out AI capacity.
