14 DAY TRIAL // Estimates indicate that YouTube advertising revenues will top $5.6 billion (€4.06 billion) for 2013, which means a huge contribution to Google’s vaults.
Google doesn’t exactly make it easier to figure out just how much money YouTube makes, since it provides no breakdown of its trimestral numbers, but eMarketer is trying to put a number on the video streaming service.
According to the aforementioned source, YouTube could bring in about $5.6 billion (€4.06 billion) in gross ad revenue this year. The data comes from analyzing “hundreds of datapoints and studies about YouTube revenues, ad impressions, rates, usage and other factors collected from research firms, investment banks, company reports and interviews with industry executives.”
Of course, given the number of elements going into this particular effort, the calculations could be completely off and it might just be easier to beg Google to provide the numbers on its own.
According to a chart created by eMarketer, YouTube’s gross ad revenue has been climbing at an impressive rate over the past couple of years, while its share in Google’s total gross ad revenues has doubled in two years. This can be easily explained by the explosive growth of the video advertising business over the past few years.
When it comes to net ad revenues, the numbers are lower, as expected, but the picture is pretty much the same when it comes to ratios between yearly results – YouTube took home $1.96 billion (€1.42 billion).
Furthermore, there are also costs to keep YouTube running and since the service is rarely unavailable to users or even running slow, it’s obvious that Google isn’t cutting any corners in funding the video streaming tool.
YouTube was acquired by Google back in 2006 for $1.6 billion (€1.16 billion), a price tag that raised a lot of eyebrows back then. However, given the way the company has managed to monetize the platform, Google has recovered its investment many times over.
