Price hikes can't stop YouTube Premium from hitting new subscriber records

Google — sorry, Alphabet — is sharing its latest financial report today, detailing the company’s Q3 2026 performance. And as you should only expect, that’s full of tons of data points about AI, token usage, and all things Search. But it also offer us an all-too-rare peek into how things are doing for one of the biggest streaming services around, as Google shares new YouTube subscriber figures.

As CEO Sundar Pichai explains, YouTube Music and YouTube Premium now count over 150 million subscribers around the world. This past spring, that figure was only at 125 million.

Now, there’s one big caveat there: The number we’re seeing also includes free trials. But so did that old 125M tally, so at least we’re comparing apples to apples.

Back when we shared those old numbers, YouTube had only just announced its latest price increases a few days prior, raising the individual monthly rate to $15.99. That may have slowed new subscriber uptake a bit, but that’s also a figure that’s difficult to drill further down on — we knew that Google was previously taking on around 25M new subscribers a quarter, but that included things like Google One in addition to YouTube. Regardless, it’s still a number that’s growing at a rate that’s admittedly pretty impressive for the service’s age.

YouTube Premium keeps announcing new perks for subscribers, like Peacock Premium, set to arrive next year. More recently, we’ve heard that audiobooks could be on the way. While those are no doubt helping Google continue to grow its subscriber numbers, we also can’t help but wonder when it might start using them to justify its next rate hike. So far, subscribers seem to be hanging on — but it remains to be seen just what they’ll tolerate.