Twenty years ago today when Jawed Karim uploaded a grainy 19-second clip titled “Me at the Zoo” to his new platform, YouTube, he ushered in a new era in online video.
The video of Karim visiting the San Diego Zoo was the first to appear on YouTube, the video platform founded by him, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. The trio sold the service to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, and in the nearly two decades since, YouTube has evolved from a simple video-sharing site into a global media juggernaut.
If it was a stand-alone business, YouTube would be worth between $475 billion and $550 billion, according to analysts at MoffettNathanson. YouTube is the second-most visited website in the world, according to Similarweb, behind only Google, and more than 20 trillion videos — including music, Shorts, podcasts and more — have been uploaded to the site as of April, YouTube said Wednesday.
“This is the streaming winner,” MoffettNathanson founding partner Michael Nathanson told CNBC. “They don’t have to invest in content. They just hope that the creator community comes to them and builds their business.”
YouTube is on track to be the biggest media company by revenue in 2025, beating Disney, Nathanson said. Nielsen’s latest Media Distributor Gauge put YouTube in first place in total TV viewership by company, taking up 12% of time watched, ahead of Disney, Fox and Netflix.
Brad Erickson, RBC Capital Markets internet services senior analyst, agreed with Nathanson’s YouTube valuation, but he said that a sum-of-the-parts viewpoint is not always the best way to value aspects of internet companies on its own.
“YouTube benefits from the fact that it’s inside of Google’s business,” Erickson said. “They have contextual data about their user base from other parts of the business that massively benefit their ability to target and drive value with their advertising.”
YouTube remains a key pillar of Google’s business at a time when its core moneymaker, Search, is facing new pressure from the rise of artificial intelligence chatbots, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, and the company comes under fire from U.S. regulators pursuing antitrust cases.
Along with Google Cloud, YouTube is a critical driver of the company’s near- to medium-term growth, and could be a hedge if and when search ever slows down, Nathanson said. Together, they contribute more than 30% of Alphabet‘s total revenue and are its fastest-growing scaled businesses, according to MoffettNathanson.
The video service’s growth is primarily driven by its Premium, Music and YouTube TV subscription offerings. Nathanson estimates that YouTube Premium and Music have roughly 107 million paid subscribers collectively, and that is expected to grow to 145 million by the end of 2027. YouTube TV, meanwhile, will have roughly 11.5 million subscribers by the end of 2027, according to Nathanson’s estimates.
Neal Mohan, chief executive officer of YouTube Inc., at the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, US, on Wednesday, July 12, 2023.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
The threat of TikTok and antitrust
One of YouTube’s key competitors is TikTok, which gained popularity in the U.S. as a result of pandemic lockdowns in 2020. In response, Google invested in the development of YouTube Shorts, a short-form, vertical video feature within the video platform. Shorts competes with TikTok and also offers an ad-share program for creators.
Though Shorts has helped Google stay competitive in the short-form video market, Nathanson said the format has been a drag on YouTube’s overall revenue due to the ongoing challenges of monetization.
“It’s probably helping them drive engagement, but I don’t think it’s an added benefit to revenues,” said Nathanson.
Despite TikTok’s rise, YouTube continues to play a key role in the creator economy. Between 2021 and 2024, YouTube paid $70 billion to creators, with payouts rising each year, according YouTube CEO Neal Mohan.
Among those creators is Jacklyn Dallas, 23, who has been posting videos to YouTube since 2015 when she was 13 years old. Dallas has amassed nearly a quarter million subscribers since then.
“I think being a YouTuber is the greatest thing of all time,” said Dallas, whose full time job since graduating college is making videos for her NothingButTech channel. “There are all these doors and paths that would never be open previously that you now get to do and it’s all enabled, not only by YouTube, but also by the audience that watches the videos.”
Dallas has posted more than 500 videos to YouTube. Her videos include breakdowns about innovations in tech and interviews with tech executives, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
In her 10 years as a creator, Dallas says YouTube has significantly changed how creators can connect with their audiences, how YouTubers are perceived by the media and the value of a subscriber. Looking ahead, Dallas said she’s excited about new features the Google video service could implement to make it easier for creators to reach viewers that have yet to be announced.
“I feel like YouTube is like a knowledge game, and so anyone could become a creator if they put in the repetitions of learning what makes a great video,” Dallas said. “Data gives you the ability to do that.”
A key challenge for YouTube will be how Google parent company Alphabet fares in federal court.
A federal judge last week ruled that Google held illegal monopolies in online advertising markets. It’s unclear what remedies the Justice Department will seek in that case, but YouTube is a key focus and potential asset that Google could be forced to divest.
“Google will have incentives to encourage more competition possibly by loosening certain restrictions on certain media it controls, YouTube being one of them,” Gartner’s Andrew Frank said.
— CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.
FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.
Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP
Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.
The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.
CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”
Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.
Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.
For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.
Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.
Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
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In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.
Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.
“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”
CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.
The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.
In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.
The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.
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Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.
The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.
Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.
“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.
Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.
Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.
While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.