Who Owns YouTube: The Second Most Visited Website In The World

Owned by Alphabet (the company behind Google), YouTube is the second most popular website worldwide, right after Google Search. 

The headquarters of the American social networking and video-sharing platform YouTube are located in San Bruno, California. YouTube was registered on  February 14, 2005, by Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steve Chen started it. Every day, approximately one billion hours of video content are seen on YouTube, which has over 2.5 billion monthly users.

YouTube has created multimillionaire celebrities and influenced online trends and popular culture in ways never seen before in society. It has been heavily criticized despite its popularity and growth for allegedly aiding in the dissemination of false information, sharing content that is protected by copyright, regularly violating the privacy of its users, permitting censorship, putting children’s safety and wellbeing in jeopardy, and implementing platform guidelines inconsistently or incorrectly.

Who Owns Youtube?

Youtube is an online video-sharing and social media platform which is owned by Google LLC, an American Multinational Technology Company.

When Google spent $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube in October 2006, the platform’s income model was completely transformed from just selling advertisements to offering paid content such as movies and YouTube-exclusive content. For ad-free content viewing, YouTube Premium is an additional premium subscription option.

YouTube has grown beyond its main website since being acquired by Google, adding mobile applications, network television, and cross-platform connectivity. YouTube offers a wide variety of video content, including music videos, news, vlogs, short and full-length films, songs, documentaries, teasers, live streams, and movie trailers. 

The majority of videos are created by one person, even in cases where YouTubers and commercial sponsors work together. In an effort to reach a wider audience for their advertisements, well-known media companies, including Disney, Paramount, NBCUniversal, and Warner Bros. Discovery have also set up and grown their corporate YouTube pages.

Image source: Forbes

Google LLC

While pursuing their doctorates at Stanford University in California, American software engineers Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google on September 4, 1998. Together, they possess roughly 14% of the company’s shares that are listed publicly and, thanks to super-voting stock, 56% of the voting power cast by stockholders. In 2004, the business made its initial public offering (IPO) public. 2015 saw a reorganization of Google into an Alphabet Inc. wholly-owned subsidiary.

 Google, Alphabet’s biggest subsidiary, serves as the holding company for the corporation’s online assets and ventures. On October 24, 2015, Sundar Pichai took over as Google’s CEO, succeeding Larry Page, who was appointed CEO of Alphabet. Additionally, on December 3, 2019, Pichai was appointed CEO of Alphabet. Since then, the business has expanded quickly to provide a wide range of goods and services outside of Google Search, several of which have taken the lead in their respective markets.

Email (Gmail), cloud computing (Cloud), web browsing (Chrome), video sharing (YouTube), cloud storage (Drive), language translation (Translate), photo storage (Photos), video calling (Meet), Play Music, Hangouts, and Inbox by Gmail are among the Google products that have been discontinued. Other than Internet services and consumer goods, Google’s endeavors include smart cities (Sidewalk Labs).

The most popular websites in the world are Google and YouTube, followed by Facebook and X (previously known as Twitter). According to market share, Google is also the biggest search engine, visualizing and navigation app, email service company, office suite, video sharing network, cloud storage and photo supplier, mobile operating system, web browser, machine learning framework, and artificial intelligence virtual assistant provider worldwide. Google is ranked fourth by Interbrand and second by Forbes on the list of the most valuable brands.

Owners of Google LLC

Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Sundar Pichai are the top individual insiders at Google, while Vanguard Group Inc., BlackRock Inc. (BLK), T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., and FMR LLC are the top institutional shareholders.

Larry Page, Co-founder of Google, the parent company that owns YouTube Source: CNN

Top Individual Insider Shareholders

Direct ownership of shares is how individual insider shareholders hold their shares. The shares shown here do not include shares that are indirectly held or shares that are available through stock options. Every time an insider purchases or sells a large portion of the company’s stock, they are required to submit an SEC Form 4.

The share numbers for Larry Page and Sergey Brin below are actually class B shares; their value is determined by counting and determining whether they have been converted to class C shares. As class B shares are not traded, they hold no “market value.”

Larry Page

Approximately 3.0% of Alphabet’s outstanding shares, or 19.8 million shares, are owned by Larry Page. In addition to serving on the Alphabet board, Page is a co-founder of Google. From the company’s inception until 2001, as well as from 2011 to 2015, he served as CEO of Google. From late 2015 until his resignation in late 2019, he served as Alphabet’s CEO. Page has a net worth of almost $120 billion, making him the fifth richest person in the United States.

Sergey Brin

With 19.0 million Alphabet shares under his ownership, Sergey Brin accounts for almost 2.9% of the company’s outstanding shares. In addition to being an associate of the Alphabet board, Brin is a controlling stakeholder and co-founder of Google. Up until December 2019, he presided over Alphabet as president. With an estimated worth of around $116 billion, Brin is the sixth richest person in the United States.

Sundar Pichai

0.01% of Alphabet’s outstanding shares, or 88,693 shares, are owned by Sundar Pichai. Pichai serves as the CEO of Alphabet and Google in addition to being a director on the company’s board. He supervised the team in charge of Google Chrome and played a key role in the creation of Google Toolbar when he joined the company in 2004 as its executive vice president in charge of product management. 

2013 saw him ascend to the position of leader of the operating system used by Android, which significantly boosted Google’s market share worldwide. Pichai took over as Alphabet’s CEO in December 2019 after serving as Google’s CEO in 2015.

Top Institutional Shareholders

Approximately 34.4% of Alphabet’s outstanding class A shares and 31.6% of its outstanding class C shares are held by institutional investors. Institutional investors, defined as institutional investment managers having assets under management (AUM) of at least $100 million, are required to report their equity holdings on an SEC Form 13F, which they must file on a quarterly basis. 

If an individual purchases five percent or more of a company’s shares, they may be deemed institutional investors and must file a Schedule 13D or Schedule 13G form.

Vanguard Group Inc.

One of the biggest investment management firms in the world, Vanguard Group offers over 440 exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and inexpensive traditional products. With over $7.2 trillion in international assets under management (AUM), Vanguard is mainly a mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) manager. 

According to its 13F filing for the period of time ending June 30, 2021, Vanguard has 22.8 million class A shares, or around 7.6% of all existing class A shares, and 21.3 million class C shares, or roughly 6.6% of all outstanding class C shares.

Vanguard owns more than 44 million shares of Alphabet altogether. Several Vanguard funds have Alphabet shares, including the $4.6 billion Vanguard Communication Services ETF (VOX). The fund’s second- and third-largest assets, respectively, are GOOGL shares, which make up 11.5% of the portfolio, and GOOG shares, which make up 11.1%.

BlackRock, Inc.

iShares ETF products are sold by BlackRock Inc. (BLK), one of the largest asset managers in the world. With around $8.7 trillion in AUM as of December 31, 2020, the company’s primary business is the management of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). According to its 13F filing for the period ending June 30, 2021, BlackRock has 19.1 million class C shares, or approximately 6.0% of all existing class C shares, and 20.2 million class A shares, or roughly 6.7% of all outstanding class A shares. 

BlackRock owns 39.3 million shares of Alphabet altogether. With over $290.4 billion in AUM, the iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV) is one of BlackRock’s largest ETFs. 2.1% of the fund’s portfolio is made up of GOOG shares, while 2.3% is made up of GOOGL shares, with both making up the final top 10 holdings of the fund.

T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.

According to Alphabet’s 13F filing for the quarter ended June 30, 2021, T. Rowe Price Associates owns 14.0 million class C shares, or 4.4% of all outstanding class C shares. T. Rowe Price Associates is a division of T. Rowe Price Group Inc. (TROW), a global asset management company with over $1.6 trillion in total assets under management. The company provides a range of ETFs, mutual funds, and related products. The T. Rowe Price Blue Chip Growth ETF (TCHP), one of the company’s major ETFs, with $225.3 million in assets under management (AUM). With roughly 9.0% of the invested assets in the fund, GOOG is the second-largest holding in the portfolio.

FMR LLC

Per the firm’s 13F filing for the period ended June 30, 2021, FMR LLC owned 13.1 million class A shares of Alphabet, or 4.4% of all outstanding class A shares. Financial planning, wealth management, retirement choices, brokerage, and investment management are all provided by FMR, one of the biggest financial services firms in the country. 

Fidelity Investments, with a total discretion AUM of almost $4.2 trillion, is owned by the corporation. The firm runs a variety of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. One of the mutual funds offered by the company that owns shares of GOOGL is the Fidelity Growth Company Fund (FDGRX), which has over $64.5 billion in net assets. Both GOOGL shares are among the top 10 holdings in the portfolio of the firm.

Google’s acquisition of Youtube

The announcement was made on October 9, 2006 that Google would acquire the company for US$1.65 billion in stock. The deal was finalized on November 13. It was Google’s second-highest investment at the time. This sparked popularity for many YouTubers and propelled YouTube’s ascent to become the world’s leading media platform. 

It also built a multibillion-dollar business that has eclipsed the majority of television networks and other media marketplaces. In fact, YouTube as a whole brought in more than twice as much money as any other major TV network in 2018 ($15 billion versus NBC’s $7 billion). 

In an effort to avert copyright infringement charges, YouTube submitted several agreements with media businesses prior to the deal between Google and YouTube. YouTube intended to stay an independent business, with its 68 employees and co-founders still employed by Google. In the early days of YouTube’s partnership with Google, the platform grew mostly due to popular videos like Evolution of Dance, David After the Dentist, and others.

The SEC report from Google on February 7, 2007, provided investors with a breakdown of YouTube’s profits following the company’s sale to Google. 2010 saw more than $395 million in earnings for Chad Hurley and more than $326 million for Steve Chen.

Time Magazine’s ‘Time Person Of The Year’ for 2006 was a YouTube screen with a giant mirror. It featured a number of content creators in addition to the site’s founders and referenced user-generated media from places like YouTube. In 2006, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times also examined content that had been placed on YouTube, paying special attention to how it affected recruitment and corporate messaging.

 YouTube was ranked ninth in PC World Magazine’s list of the Top 10 Best Products of 2006. In 2007, the basketball highlights DVD The Ultimate Pistol Pete Maravich MIX received favorable reviews from Sports Illustrated and Dime Magazine.

Google’s Impressive Stock Price Performance

The first public offering (IPO) of Google happened on August 19, 2004. The company priced 19,605,052 shares at $85 each during its initial public offering (IPO). Google now has a market valuation of almost $23 billion after selling $1.67 billion. The stock saw great success following the IPO, with shares reaching $350 in their initial offering on October 31, 2007, mostly as a result of profitable and well-performing online advertising sales. 

Rather than big financial institutions and mutual funds, individual investors drove the majority of the stock price increase. Divided into GOOG class C shares and GOOGL class A shares are the shares of GOOG. Under the tickers GOOGL and GOOG on the NASDAQ stock exchange and GGQ1 on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, the corporation is listed. 

Since the fourth quarter of 2015, Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, is denoted by these ticker symbols. Google claimed a 700% rise in earnings in the third quarter of 2005, primarily as a result of big businesses switching from print to online advertising in newspapers, magazines, and television.

The corporation recorded $10.492 billion in total revenue from advertisements for the 2006 fiscal year, but just $112 million in revenues from licensing and other sources. 2011 saw Google’s advertising programs provide 96% of the company’s revenue.

After grossing $38 billion the year before, Google made $50 billion in revenue annually for the first time in 2012. Former CEO Larry Page stated in January 2013, “We closed 2012 with a solid quarter… Revenues increased 8% on a quarterly basis and 36% on an annual basis. Additionally, last year marked our first time reaching $50 billion in sales, which is a respectable accomplishment in just 15 years.”

Read more: GOOG vs GOOGL: What’s the Difference?

Mid-October 2013 saw the announcement of Google’s overall earnings for the third quarter of 2013, which came in at $14.89 billion, up 12% from the previous quarter. Of this amount, $10.8 billion came from Google’s Internet business due to a rise in the number of user clicks on adverts. Google’s market valuation reached $397 billion by January 2014.

The bottom line

The internet environment was drastically altered when Google paid $1.65 billion in stock to acquire YouTube in October 2006. Along with giving Google a strong platform for video output, the ownership turned YouTube into a massive cultural and financial force. This calculated action gave Google the opportunity to leverage YouTube’s enormous user base and cultural sway in order to profit from the increasing popularity of online video consumption.

YouTube’s financial success was reinforced by the integration, which made creative monetization tactics through advertising possible. Because YouTube is owned by Google, the platform has been able to grow over time and add new features while continuing to have a big influence on digital media. This acquisition highlights the synergy between a large search engine and a video-sharing platform, altering the IT industry and serving as a testament to Google’s strategic vision.

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