YouTube Shorts Revenue on Par With Regular Videos, CEO Neal Mohan Says

Just a day after its flashy upfront presentation to advertisers, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan revealed that Shorts’ revenue per watch-hour is now on par with its core YouTube business in multiple countries, including the United States. Its monetization rate also now exceeds the core business in some countries.

“It’s something that we have been working on for a while and it’s a testament to both the viewer side, but also the quality of the ad products that we build for our advertisers,” Mohan told an investor conference hosted by MoffettNathanson on Thursday.

The TikTok-style short-form video platform also saw a 20% year over year increase in viewership during the first quarter of 2025. About 70% of channels on YouTube upload on Shorts.

“Especially for younger audiences, viewing video is increasingly participatory in nature,” Mohan added. “They want to jump in themselves and participate in that creation process. And Shorts just makes that easy and straightforward.”

The growth for Shorts comes as YouTube viewing on TVs surpassed mobile during the first quarter of 2025. YouTube has also consistently been ranked the leader in streaming watch time in the U.S., per Nielsen.

At its Brandcast presentation on Wednesday, YouTube revealed that its ad campaigns on connected TVs drove over 50 million monthly average conversions in the fourth quarter of 2024, citing internal data.

Additionally, overall music watch time on its platform grew 10% year over year as of December and it surpassed 1 billion monthly active podcast users as of January.

YouTube previously revealed that its Music and Premium services have over 125 million subscribers.

Looking ahead, Mohan said that YouTube would look to give advertisers the ability to take their existing creative and use AI to translate it to the Shorts format.

MoffettNathanson estimates that YouTube as a standalone business could be worth as much as $550 billion.It also predicts the platform could overtake Disney in 2025 as the largest media company by revenue. In 2024, YouTube was the second-largest with revenue of $54.2 billion.

This year, YouTube will celebrate its 20th anniversary.

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