YouTube Premium Revenue for Creators: What Google Actually Documents

Search for how YouTube Premium pays creators and for years you got the same sentence back from a dozen sites: YouTube takes a 45% cut of Premium earnings, exactly like ad revenue. Always stated flatly, never with a link, as though quoted from a contract.

We went looking for the source and could not find one. Not on Google's revenue split page, not on either help page Google wrote about Premium and creators, not in YouTube's own Partner Program explainer. For long-form video, YouTube had never published a Premium percentage at all. We wrote most of this article about that absence.

Then, on August 10, 2026, YouTube published the numbers.

Buried in the Partner Program restructure announcement is the thing nobody outside Google had seen: creators share a pool worth 30% of net Premium subscription revenue, and 60% for Premium Lite, and from that distribution creators receive 55% for long-form videos and 45% for Shorts.

So here is the verdict on eight years of folklore, and it is more interesting than a simple debunking. The 45% claim was right about the layer it described and completely blind to the layer underneath it. Creators really do get 55% of the long-form Premium distribution, exactly as everyone inferred from the ad split. What nobody knew was that the distribution itself is carved out of a pool worth 30% of the subscription fee. The people repeating "creators get 55% of Premium" were describing the second step of a two-step process and calling it the whole journey.

One thing to be clear about before going further: these terms take effect on February 1, 2027. Until then, the arrangement in force is the old, undocumented one. This article is therefore written in two tenses on purpose, and the distinction matters if you are modelling income for this year rather than next.

How YouTube pays you is the parent guide, covering every income stream and the whole payment pipeline. This is the deep dive on the one line item it handles in a sentence.

What YouTube actually documents about Premium

Start with the page that matters most: the YouTube partner earnings overview. It is the closest thing YouTube has to a published rate card, and it is precise. Here is what it commits to, in its own words:

Quotes taken from Google's YouTube partner earnings overview, read 2026-08-10.

Three revenue types get exact percentages. The fourth gets a mention in a list. On a page whose entire purpose is to state what YouTube pays, that is not an oversight you can wave away, and it is worth noting that the August 2026 announcement did not fix it. The new Premium numbers were published in a blog post and a changes page. The rate card page still lists Premium without a figure. If you go looking in the obvious place, you will still come up empty.

Now the two pages Google wrote specifically about Premium and creators.

Your content and YouTube Premium explains the mechanism: "Revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content." It tells you which monetization modules you need to accept to earn any of it, the Watch Page Monetization Module for long-form and the Shorts Feed Monetization Module for Shorts. It confirms Premium money arrives monthly alongside ad revenue. And it gives exactly one quantitative statement, which is not a number: "As with our advertising business, the majority of the revenue will go to our partners."

How YouTube Premium supports creators is written for viewers rather than creators and says the same thing in friendlier language: "we share your monthly membership fee with creators. Best of all, the more videos you watch from your favorite creators, the more money they make." No percentage.

So the documented picture for long-form Premium revenue, as it stands today and through January 2027, is: it is shared, it is allocated by Premium watch time, and the majority of it goes to partners in aggregate. "Majority" means more than half. It does not mean 55%, and until August 2026 it did not mean YouTube had publicly committed to any figure.

That is still the arrangement paying you right now. The numbers in the next section replace it in February.

What the August 2026 announcement actually says

Two layers, and the gap between them is the whole story.

Layer one, the pool. From February 1, 2027, creators collectively share "a dedicated pool of revenue for each subscription type: 30% of the net subscription revenue for Premium and 60% for Premium Lite." That is the slice of your subscriber's monthly fee that reaches creators at all.

Layer two, the split. That pool "is distributed to creators based on member watch time and views, and from that distribution creators receive revenue share: 55% for long-form videos and 45% for Shorts."

The second layer is the one everybody guessed correctly. The first layer is the one nobody had. And you cannot get a headline "creators get X% of Premium" number by putting them together, which is exactly what you are going to see people do this month.

There is one more consequence, easy to miss and expensive if you do. From the same announcement, Shorts creators are eligible for "ads and subscription revenue sharing on Shorts" only once they hit 10 million qualified Shorts views over 90 days. The Shorts Premium share is gated behind the same threshold as the Shorts ad pool. Below that bar, a channel loses both together. The full breakdown of the 2027 changes covers what that means in practice.

The Shorts percentage YouTube published all along

Here is the part that surprised us when we first went looking, and that we have not seen a single other article mention.

YouTube's Shorts monetization policies page, which explains how the Shorts Creator Pool works, contains this line:

"YouTube will pay 45% of the net revenue from YouTube Premium that is allocated to monetizing creators for Shorts."

Read it carefully. On the Shorts side, creators are paid 45% of the Premium revenue allocated to them. Which means YouTube retains the other 55% on that slice.

That is a documented Premium percentage, and until August 2026 it was the only one anywhere in Google's material. It is worth knowing about for its own sake, because it is still live, still on a help page rather than buried in an announcement, and it lines up exactly with the 45% Shorts figure in the new terms. The Shorts side of Premium has been consistent and public the whole time. It was only long-form that sat in the dark.

That same page also explains the rest of the Shorts pool mechanics: revenue from ads between Shorts is collected monthly, split with music licensing where tracks are used, allocated by each creator's share of engaged views by country, and then "Monetizing creators will keep 45% of their allocated revenue, regardless if music was used or not." Premium money flows into that same structure at the same 45%. It is internally consistent, and it is written down.

For long-form watch page revenue there was nothing equivalent on any help page, and there still is not. The figure exists now, but it lives in an announcement.

Where the 45% claim probably came from

The uncharitable read is that someone guessed. The charitable read, and the more likely one, is that someone reasoned it out and then a hundred people dropped the reasoning and kept the conclusion.

The inference goes like this. YouTube pays 55% on watch page ads. Premium revenue for long-form is paid alongside watch page ads, through the same monetization module, on the same monthly cycle, into the same line in your analytics. YouTube says the majority goes to partners. Therefore the long-form Premium split is probably also 55/45.

That is a reasonable inference, and as of August 2026 we know it was correct. YouTube's own wording gives creators 55% for long-form out of the Premium distribution, precisely mirroring the watch page ad split, exactly as the reasoning predicted.

So the guess was right. It is worth sitting with why that still is not a happy ending.

1. It was right about the wrong thing. The inference answered "what is the split?" when the question that mattered was "the split of what?" Nobody guessed there was a 30% pool sitting underneath, because nothing in the ad-revenue analogy hinted at one. A creator who believed "I get 55% of Premium" was not slightly off. They were describing the second half of a calculation whose first half they did not know existed.
2. You could not have defended it. If you built a rate card or a pitch on that number in 2025, you were quoting a figure you could not source. It happened to survive contact with reality. That is luck, and luck is not a methodology you can repeat next time.
3. Unpublished numbers can move without warning. Published splits are commitments YouTube announces changes to. An unpublished allocation can be adjusted without anyone outside Google noticing, which is precisely why the pool layer could exist unremarked for years.

The lesson is not that the crowd got it right. It is that for eight years nobody could tell the difference between the part the crowd had right and the part it did not have at all, and the part it did not have turned out to be the larger one.

Our position is simple. Where YouTube publishes a number, we quote it. Where it does not, we say so and label the alternative for what it is. There is a lot of it about in this corner of the creator economy, which is why our per-1,000-views comparison tags every figure as documented or creator-reported rather than blending them into a single confident-looking table.

How Premium money actually reaches you

Forget percentages for a moment. The mechanism is the interesting part, and it is fully documented.

An ad-supported view pays you through an auction. An advertiser bids to reach that viewer, the impression serves, revenue is attributed to your video, you get your share. The money is tied to an impression event.

A Premium view pays you through an allocation. The subscriber has already paid a flat monthly fee. No ad serves. At the end of the month, YouTube takes the subscription revenue, and distributes it "based on how much members watch your content." Your share of Premium watch time becomes your share of that money.

Four consequences fall straight out of that difference, and they are the whole reason Premium behaves so differently from ads:

Advertiser demand is irrelevant to Premium. Nobody bid on that view. A niche where advertisers pay next to nothing earns exactly the same Premium allocation per watched minute as a niche where they pay a fortune, because the subscription fee is the same either way.

Minutes matter, not views. Ad revenue keys off monetized playbacks. Premium keys off watch time. A 30-minute video watched most of the way through by a Premium member is worth many times what a 3-minute video watched by the same member is worth, even though both count as one view.

Downloads and background play count. Per Google's Premium page, "Watch time for downloaded videos is recorded and incorporated just like online watch time the next time a member signs in online," and "Content played while a YouTube Premium member is using other apps or has their device's screen turned off counts toward your watch time." Offline and screen-off listening earn nothing from ads. They earn Premium revenue.

You have to be opted in. Premium revenue only reaches you if you have accepted the relevant monetization module. Long-form Premium revenue requires the Watch Page Monetization Module with watch page ads turned on. Shorts Premium revenue requires the Shorts Feed Monetization Module. Declining ads does not leave Premium money on the table for you to collect separately.

That last point catches people who assume they can turn off ads, keep their audience happy, and still collect a Premium share. That is not how it is set up.

Premium is inside your RPM. It is also inside your CPM.

This trips up almost everyone, including people who write about it, so it is worth being exact.

Google's ad revenue analytics page defines the two metrics side by side. The relevant rows, verbatim:

Quotes taken from Google's "Understand ad revenue analytics" page, read 2026-08-10.

Premium appears in both columns. Your RPM includes it, which most creators half-know. Your CPM includes it too, which almost nobody knows, and which quietly undermines the popular framing of CPM as "pure advertiser money."

There is a genuine oddity in that CPM definition worth flagging: the numerator includes Premium revenue while the denominator is limited to playbacks where an ad was shown, and by definition a Premium view shows no ad. So Premium revenue is being divided by a view count that excludes the views that generated it. We are not claiming that is a mistake, only that it makes CPM a blunter instrument than it looks, and it is one more reason to treat CPM as a diagnostic and RPM as the scorecard. Our full breakdown of what counts as a good CPM covers the rest of that distinction, and the CPM calculator crosses niche against country if you want a range for your own combination.

The practical upshot for reading your own numbers: the gap between your CPM and your RPM is not a clean 45% haircut. It is the revenue share, plus non-monetized views, plus the different denominators, plus a Premium contribution sitting on both sides of the comparison. If you have been halving your CPM to estimate your RPM, that rule of thumb still works fine as a ballpark, but do not read the residual as a precise measure of anything.

How to find your own Premium revenue

Here is where the honesty gets slightly uncomfortable, because Google's own documentation is inconsistent about whether you can see this number.

The Premium help page tells creators: "You can review watch time and views from YouTube Premium members and earnings by following these instructions for YouTube Analytics." So it exists and you are meant to be able to see it.

But the page those instructions point at, Check your YouTube revenue, defines the revenue metrics like this:

• Watch Page ad revenue: "Estimated revenue from AdSense for YouTube, DoubleClick ads, and YouTube Premium for the selected date range and area."
• Shorts Feed ad revenue: "Estimated revenue from Shorts Feed ads and YouTube Premium for the selected date range."

Premium is folded into both of the lines labelled "ad revenue." If you only read your revenue tab at that level, your Premium income is invisible, sitting inside a number that says "ad" on the front of it. That alone explains why so many creators believe they earn nothing from Premium.

The number is definitely tracked, though, and it has a documented name. YouTube's Analytics and Reporting API metrics reference defines three Premium metrics, still using the old YouTube Red naming internally:

• estimatedRedPartnerRevenue: "The total estimated revenue earned from YouTube Premium (previously known as YouTube Red) subscriptions for the selected report dimensions. The metric's value reflects revenue from both music and non-music content and is subject to month-end adjustment."
• redViews: "The number of times that a video was viewed by YouTube Premium (previously known as YouTube Red) members."
• estimatedRedMinutesWatched: "The number of minutes that YouTube Premium (previously known as YouTube Red) members watched a video."

So, practically:

1. Start in YouTube Studio, Analytics, Revenue tab. Check the revenue source breakdown for a YouTube Premium line. If your channel surfaces one, that is your answer, and you can stop.
2. If you do not see one, do not go hunting for a setting. Per the definitions above, Premium is included in the two ad revenue lines. You are looking at it. You just cannot see the split.
3. To isolate it properly, use the API metrics. Any analytics tool with YouTube API access can pull estimatedRedPartnerRevenue alongside redViews and estimatedRedMinutesWatched, which gets you a real Premium revenue figure and a real Premium watch-time figure for the same period.
4. Do the ratio, not the absolute. Premium revenue divided by total estimated revenue tells you how exposed your channel is to Premium. Premium minutes divided by total minutes tells you how much of your audience pays. Those two ratios are more useful than either dollar figure on its own, and they are the things you can actually act on.

One caveat straight from Google: Premium revenue is "subject to month-end adjustment," and per Google's revenue-checking guide, "it takes 2 days for revenue to show in YouTube Analytics." Do not draw conclusions from a partial month.

Which channels over-index on Premium

This is the part that actually changes decisions, and it follows from the documented mechanism rather than from anybody's guess. Because Premium pays on your share of Premium watch time rather than on ad impressions, the channels that punch above their weight have some combination of four traits.

Long sessions. Watch time is the entire allocation basis. A channel whose median video is 25 minutes accumulates Premium minutes at a rate a channel of 6-minute videos cannot match at the same view count. This is the same insight behind mid-roll strategy, but with a twist: mid-rolls need retention through specific ad breaks, whereas Premium just counts the minutes wherever they land.

High retention. Same reason, one level down. Two videos with identical view counts and wildly different average view durations earn similar ad impressions on the pre-roll and very different Premium allocations.

Low advertiser demand. Here is the counterintuitive one. Premium pays the same per watched minute regardless of what advertisers think of your niche, so the share of your revenue that comes from Premium goes up as your ad rates go down. A channel with a $2 RPM in a low-bid category is not earning more Premium money than a finance channel; it is earning a bigger fraction of its total from Premium, because the ad side is small. Commentary, hobby content, long-form gaming, sleep and study content, and anything where advertisers bid low but people watch for a long time all fit this profile. We are reasoning from the documented mechanism here rather than from a dataset, so treat it as a well-grounded expectation, not a measurement.

Premium-heavy audiences. Premium is not available everywhere. Google's availability page lists the regions where Premium, Music Premium, and Premium Lite can be purchased, notes that "YouTube paid memberships may not be available in some provinces or territories, even if the governing country/region is listed above," and warns that benefits change when members travel outside their subscription country. Where Premium is available, subscription uptake still varies enormously by market. This layers on top of the geography effect on ad rates that we cover in YouTube CPM rates by country, and it does not layer cleanly: a market can be weak for advertisers and reasonable for subscriptions, or the reverse.

There is also a format effect that is easy to miss. Because downloads and background play both count, content people listen to rather than watch does unusually well on Premium and unusually badly on ads. If your audience puts your videos on with the screen off during a commute, that is watch time you are being paid for through Premium and not through advertising.

Ad blockers are not Premium, and this is where the myth gets dangerous

A version of this topic circulates that goes: "don't worry about ad blockers, creators still get paid because of Premium." It is wrong, and the two situations are worth separating cleanly because people conflate them constantly.

A Premium subscriber watching ad-free pays you. They handed YouTube a monthly fee. YouTube allocates a share of that fee by watch time. Your minutes get their slice. No ad served, and you still earn.

Someone running an ad blocker pays nobody. No advertiser paid for an impression, because none served. No subscription fee entered the system, because they did not buy one. There is no pool for that view to draw from. Google's revenue metrics have no line item for it because there is no revenue to report.

That is the genuinely shareable fact in this whole subject, and it is the opposite of the way it usually gets told. Watching with Premium is a direct financial contribution to the specific creators you watch, weighted by how long you watch them. Blocking ads is not a neutral alternative to it; it removes the view from the revenue system entirely. A viewer who watches four hours of one channel on Premium moves meaningfully more money to that channel than a casual ad-supported viewer does, and infinitely more than an ad-blocked one.

It also reframes the "ad blockers are killing my RPM" complaint. Ad-blocked views are part of the gap between your CPM and your RPM, because they are views that generated no ad revenue. Premium views are in that gap too, but for the opposite reason: they generated revenue through a channel that never touched an ad impression. Two very different things producing a similar-looking dent in the same metric. The per-view rates guide walks through the rest of what lives in that gap.

Premium Lite makes the picture messier

In March 2025, YouTube introduced a cheaper tier. Its announcement post, dated March 5, 2025, priced Premium Lite at "$7.99 per month" for US users, with Thailand, Germany, and Australia following, and framed it as revenue-positive for creators: "YouTube Music and Premium, and the expansion of Premium Lite, also continue to create additional revenue opportunities for our creators and partners."

The Premium Lite help page spells out what it covers. Members "watch most YouTube and YouTube Kids videos ad-free, offline, and in the background," but "Ads, however, may still appear on music content, Shorts, and when you search or browse." It does not include YouTube Music Premium.

The August 2026 announcement finally weighted the tiers, and the answer is not the one most people would predict: the creator pool is 60% of net subscription revenue for Premium Lite against 30% for full Premium. Lite's pool share is double.

Before anyone concludes that Lite subscribers are worth more to them, sit with what those percentages are percentages of. Lite is the cheaper tier. A larger share of a smaller fee is not automatically more money, and YouTube has published neither the net price of each tier by market nor what "net subscription revenue" is net of. Whether a Lite minute out-earns a Premium minute depends entirely on numbers that are not public.

There is a plausible reason for the gap that is worth stating as reasoning rather than fact: full Premium bundles YouTube Music, so some of that fee is presumably owed to the music side before video creators see any of it. Lite does not include Music. A bigger creator share of a fee with fewer claims on it would be internally consistent. YouTube has not said this, so treat it as a sensible reading and not an explanation you can quote.

The second thing has not changed:

A Premium Lite member still sees ads on Shorts and on music content. So for a Shorts-heavy channel, a Lite subscriber is closer to a normal ad-supported viewer than to a Premium one. For a long-form channel, they are much closer to a Premium viewer. Which tier your audience buys therefore matters differently depending on what you make, and none of it shows up as a separate line anywhere in your analytics.

How big is the pool, honestly

You will see confident dollar figures for YouTube Premium revenue quoted around the web. Almost all of them are third-party estimates, because Alphabet does not break out YouTube subscription revenue as its own line. We are not going to repeat estimates dressed up as facts, so here is only what is verifiable.

In March 2025, YouTube's Global Head of Music, Lyor Cohen, announced that "we've reached 125 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, including trials." Note both qualifiers. That is Music and Premium combined, and it counts trials.

More recently, TechCrunch reported on April 29, 2026 that Google "now has 350 million paid subscriptions across its services, up from 325 million in Q4 2025," with YouTube and Google One driving the growth. That 350 million is company-wide across all Google subscription products, not a YouTube Premium count. It tells you the direction of travel, nothing more precise.

What that means for you: the Premium pool is large and growing, and the number of creators dividing it is also large and growing. Subscriber growth increases the pool; it does not increase your slice unless your share of Premium watch time holds up. Both halves of that fraction move.

What to actually do with all this

Five things, in order of how much they are worth.

1. Find your Premium ratio, once. Pull estimatedRedPartnerRevenue against total estimated revenue for a full recent month. If Premium is a rounding error on your channel, stop thinking about it. If it is 15% or 20% of your income, it deserves a place in how you plan content length and format.
2. Stop treating ad settings as the whole monetization picture. Premium income requires the same monetization modules as ads. Turning ads off does not redirect money to a Premium bucket.
3. Read your CPM to RPM gap correctly. It contains the revenue share, non-monetized views, ad blockers, mismatched denominators, and Premium revenue pushing in the opposite direction. Any single-cause explanation for that gap is wrong.
4. Weight video length and retention decisions with Premium in mind. Ad revenue rewards monetized playbacks and mid-roll structure. Premium rewards total minutes. Long, well-retained content is paid twice for the same property.
5. Do not model Premium separately, even now that there are numbers. Two published layers with an undefined base is not the same as a usable rate. Model total revenue from your actual RPM, which already includes Premium, and treat the 30/60 and 55/45 figures as context for how the money moves rather than as inputs.

That last point is why our YouTube money calculator works from RPM ranges by niche and geography rather than trying to decompose your income into ad and Premium components. The decomposition still requires a number YouTube has not published, and a calculator built on a figure assembled from two other figures is just a confident-looking guess with extra steps.

Frequently asked questions

Do creators get paid if you watch with YouTube Premium?

Yes, and it is a direct contribution to the specific creators you watch. YouTube documents that "Revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content." Your subscription fee gets pooled and allocated by watch time, so the channels you spend the most hours on receive the largest share of your money. The creator has to have accepted the relevant monetization module to receive it, but for any monetized channel, watching on Premium pays them.

Do YouTubers get paid if you use an ad blocker?

No. This is the most common confusion in the whole topic. An ad blocker means no ad impression served, so no advertiser paid anything, and an ad-block user has not paid a subscription fee either. There is no revenue attached to that view for YouTube to share. Premium is the opposite case: the viewer has paid, so the creator earns even though no ad ran. Ad-free through Premium pays. Ad-free through blocking does not.

What percentage of YouTube Premium revenue goes to creators?

There are two numbers, not one, and YouTube only published them in August 2026. Creators share a pool worth 30% of net Premium subscription revenue, or 60% for Premium Lite. From that pool, distributed by member watch time, creators receive 55% for long-form and 45% for Shorts. Those terms take effect February 1, 2027. There is no published end-to-end figure, and you should not produce one by multiplying the two layers together, because "net subscription revenue" is undefined and the layers may not compose the way the arithmetic suggests. Before this announcement, YouTube had published no long-form Premium percentage at all; the only documented figure was the Shorts one, on the Shorts monetization policies page.

Does YouTube Premium pay more than ads per view?

Many creators report a higher effective rate on Premium views, and the mechanism makes that plausible for long, well-retained content, since Premium pays on minutes watched rather than on a single impression. But that is a creator-reported observation combined with mechanism-based reasoning, not a documented fact, and YouTube publishes nothing that confirms it. It is also format-dependent: for a short video with weak retention in a high-CPM niche, an ad-supported view can easily be worth more than a Premium one. Do not plan around Premium being the better view.

How do I see my YouTube Premium revenue in YouTube Analytics?

Go to YouTube Studio, then Analytics, then the Revenue tab, and check the revenue source breakdown for a YouTube Premium line. If you do not see one, that is not a missing setting: Google defines "Watch Page ad revenue" as including "AdSense for YouTube, DoubleClick ads, and YouTube Premium," so your Premium income is already inside the line labelled ad revenue. To isolate it, use a tool with YouTube Analytics API access and pull the documented estimatedRedPartnerRevenue metric alongside redViews and estimatedRedMinutesWatched. Allow two days for revenue to appear, and expect month-end adjustments.

Does Premium Lite pay creators the same as full Premium?

No, and the difference runs the opposite way from most people's guess. From February 1, 2027, the creator pool is 60% of net subscription revenue for Premium Lite against 30% for full Premium, so Lite's share is double. That does not mean Lite subscribers are worth more to you, because Lite is the cheaper tier and a bigger share of a smaller fee can land anywhere. YouTube publishes neither the net price by market nor what "net" excludes, so the per-member comparison is still not calculable. Also unchanged: Lite members still see ads on music content, on Shorts, and while searching or browsing, so for a Shorts-heavy channel a Lite member behaves more like a regular ad-supported viewer.

Why is my YouTube Premium revenue so small?

Usually one of three reasons. Your videos are short or retention is weak, so you accumulate few Premium minutes relative to your view count. Your audience is concentrated in markets where Premium uptake is low or unavailable, which the availability page confirms is not universal. Or, most often, your Premium revenue is not small at all and you simply cannot see it, because it is bundled into the ad revenue line in your Studio revenue breakdown. Check the ratio through the API metric before concluding Premium is not paying you.

The new figures in this article come from YouTube's Partner Program restructure announcement (published August 10, 2026) and the accompanying changes to the YouTube Partner Program help page, which together published the 30% Premium and 60% Premium Lite pool figures and the 55% long-form / 45% Shorts distribution split, all effective February 1, 2027. Both were read from raw page source rather than a summary, after a summarizing fetch was found to be dropping sentences from the announcement.

Sources, all fetched and read on August 10, 2026, and re-verified against the live pages on August 17, 2026: Google's YouTube partner earnings overview (documented 55%, 45%, and 70% splits; Premium listed without a percentage); Your content and YouTube Premium (watch-time allocation, monetization module requirements, downloads and background play, "the majority of the revenue will go to our partners"); How YouTube Premium supports creators (fee-sharing mechanism, no percentage); YouTube Shorts monetization policies (the 45% Shorts Premium figure and Creator Pool mechanics); Understand ad revenue analytics (official RPM and CPM definitions); Check your YouTube revenue (revenue metric definitions, Premium bundled into ad revenue lines); YouTube Analytics and Reporting API metrics (estimatedRedPartnerRevenue, redViews, estimatedRedMinutesWatched); Premium availability by location; Get a Premium Lite membership; YouTube's Premium Lite announcement (March 5, 2025) and 125 million subscribers post (March 5, 2025); TechCrunch on Alphabet's Q1 2026 subscription numbers (April 29, 2026). The uncited 45% Premium claim is quoted from vidIQ's YouTube Premium page (published December 30, 2025), which states it without a source. As of the August 2026 announcement that claim turns out to describe the distribution split correctly, while missing the pool layer beneath it; it was still unsourceable at the time it was written, and was for the seven months we spent unable to verify it. Disclosure: vidIQ is an affiliate partner of ours.