MoffettNathanson: YouTube became the world's largest media company in 2025 with an estimated $62B in revenue, passing $60.9B earned by Disney's media business
The influential financial research firm MoffettNathanson suggests that the Google-owned video platform passed Disney's media business in 2025.
Context & Ripple Effects
YouTube's ascent has been visible for years: it was projected to reach revenue parity with Netflix in 2021, and Alphabet subsequently reported that the platform's combined ads-and-subscriptions revenue surpassed $60B annually.
The result also reflects a broader monetization base than advertising alone. Alphabet had tied growth in its paid-subscription base to YouTube and Google One in its 270M-subscriber milestone, giving YouTube multiple routes to scale revenue.
First-order effects
- MoffettNathanson's estimate puts YouTube ahead of Disney's media business on 2025 revenue, making Google-owned YouTube the benchmark against which major media groups' scale will be compared.
- The comparison validates YouTube's combined advertising and subscription model as a media business of Disney-sized revenue scale, although the reported lead is narrow and estimate-based.
Second-order effects
- Disney and other incumbent media companies face a sharper imperative to grow streaming, advertising, and distribution revenue without relying on any one of those lines alone.
- Advertisers and creators gain further evidence that YouTube is not merely a video-distribution channel but a central media buying and monetization venue; that can intensify competition for video budgets and talent.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern persists, the industry's scale leaders will increasingly be platforms that combine global creator supply, ad technology, and paid subscriptions rather than companies organized primarily around owned film and TV catalogs.
- The revenue crossover does not settle profitability or audience value, but it strengthens a structural shift in which technology companies set the commercial pace for media.
The trend: Media leadership is shifting toward hybrid video platforms that monetize the same audience through advertising, subscriptions, and creator ecosystems at global scale.