Meta court documents reveal Instagram makes more money from ads than YouTube

While watching YouTube videos, you may have seen ads pop up many times and thought, 'YouTube must be making a lot of money because they're showing so many ads.' However, documents submitted by Meta in a lawsuit against

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/5/24122541/instagram-ad-revenue-youtube-meta-ftc-monopoly

In December 2020, the FTC filed an antitrust lawsuit against Meta (then known as Facebook) alleging that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were anticompetitive. The trial over Meta's antitrust violations has continued since then, and in April 2024, Meta argued that 'the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp did not harm consumers,' and asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit.

The Verge, an overseas media outlet, pointed out that documents submitted by Meta in the trial included detailed information about Instagram's advertising revenue, which stated that Instagram earned $32.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021, surpassing YouTube's $28.8 billion in the same year.

The trend of Instagram surpassing YouTube in ad revenue is not temporary. In 2020, Instagram's ad revenue was $22 billion (about 3.34 trillion yen) and YouTube's was $19.7 billion (about 2.99 trillion yen), and in 2019, Instagram's was $17.9 billion (about 2.72 trillion yen) and YouTube's was $15.1 billion (about 2.29 trillion yen), and Instagram has always had higher ad revenue, The Verge reports.

The reason why Instagram earns more advertising revenue than YouTube is that YouTube gives 55% of advertising revenue to creators who upload videos, while Instagram gives much less to creators.

In addition, Instagram has rolled out a ' subscription ' feature in Japan and other countries that allows creators to monetize their content, and in Europe, it offers paid plans that allow users to remove ads from Facebook and Instagram.

A paid plan that can turn off Facebook and Instagram ads for over 1,500 yen per month will be announced - GIGAZINE