• YouTube's ad revenue fell short of analysts' expectations for the third quarter.
• Its parent reported $11.2 billion in Q3 ads revenue, under analysts' $11.43 billion estimate.
• The company said it now has 150 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers, up from 125 million in March 2025.

YouTube's ad revenue growth slowed down, missing analysts' estimates in the third quarter.

Its parent company, Alphabet, reported $11.2 billion in third-quarter YouTube ads revenue, a 9% increase from a year ago. That falls below the $11.43 billion analyst consensus estimate. Its ads revenue growth also slowed from the previous quarter, when it pulled in about $11.1 billion, a 13% increase from the previous year.

Beyond YouTube, Alphabet missed expectations in other areas of its business, including on overall revenue. In a bright spot, it beat revenue estimates for its cloud business.

The company's shares were down over 10% in after-hours trading.

While YouTube's ad revenue was weaker than expected, it wasn't all bad news. The company said it now has over 150 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers, up from 125 million in March 2025. The company said its subscriptions business was growing faster than ads.

YouTube has also been the envy of rivals in key areas like TV viewership. Its share of US television viewership was about twice that of Netflix in August, according to recent Nielsen estimates. Over a third of YouTube's third-quarter ad revenue came from the living room, Google's chief business officer Philipp Schindler said on Wednesday.

Netflix, meanwhile, walked back its full-year ad revenue expectations during last week's earnings. The streamer lowered its ad revenue forecast from $3 billion to $2.7 billion after experiencing delays around the rollout of its ad products. It laid off about 1,000 workers earlier this month.

This week, Instagram unveiled an overhaul of long-form video features seemingly designed to counter YouTube and bolster its presence on TV screens.

"Everyone in streaming is chasing YouTube, and even Instagram is going to pivot their strategy based on the success that YouTube's had," said Ross Benes, a senior analyst at EMARKETER, Business Insider's sister company.

• The startup world is littered with companies that tried to become the next YouTube.
• Andrew Morse is trying it again, anyway.
• Morse's pitch: a curated app that gives creators incentives a reason to give it exclusive content.

Are you sick of the algorithms that serve you video on giant platforms like YouTube and TikTok?

Or are you a video-maker who's sick of the algorithms that don't serve your stuff to would-be watchers?

Andrew Morse would like to talk to you.

Morse, who spent years working in big media (Bloomberg, CNN) and most recently in local news (The Atlanta Journal-Constution), is building Phareo, a startup he hopes will one day rival internet media heavyweights. The secret sauce, he says: his own AI-powered discovery engine that will make both video-watchers and video-makers happy.

This is, to put it politely, a very tall order.

But it's still worth talking about, since Morse is homing in on a problem you hear a lot about in creator circles these days: the sense that people who make content are getting increasingly bad deals from platforms, because they can't control who sees their stuff.

Phareo (the name is an allusion to Pharos, the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria) says it can solve that problem by giving creators real incentives to make exclusive stuff for the company, via levers like revenue share and options. Morse plans to launch in January with an initial group of 25 creators. The app will start out as a free, ad-supported service, but he hopes to eventually offer a paid tier.

I talked to him this week about his plans, the shifting media landscape, and why he's increasingly worried about the creator economy — at the same time he's launching a creator economy app. This is an edited excerpt of our conversation:

Peter Kafka: You have a classic chicken/egg problem: Consumers are not going to use a new app unless it has compelling content they can't get somewhere else. 
Content-makers don't want to put their stuff there unless there's a big audience.

Andrew Morse: It is the most important question we have to solve.
It starts with dissatisfaction, and it starts with a belief from consumers and creators, that they're not being currently served as well as they could be. So we're working with creators who believe that there has to be a better alternative.

We don't really have anything to lose, given the direction that the platforms are taking and given the overreliance that their creative work has on algorithms that don't serve them. We're going to build with creators and try to build a super-passionate core and grow from there.

But YouTube, TikTok, Reels, etc do a great job of giving me tons of video. And they have unlimited content. How do you move me over from the platforms I'm already using?

It's an ironic conundrum — we're trying to solve the discovery problem, but we have to be discovered ourselves.

Over the years, I've seen many companies say they're trying to solve a discovery problem. 
But it doesn't seem like consumers have a discovery problem. It's the content owners who have a problem getting their stuff in front of consumers. What's the incentive for consumers to move to a platform content-owners like? 


There's an inherent assumption that consumers are satisfied with the platforms. I don't think that that's true. I think consumers are on these platforms because they have to be. Whether they're getting what they want in an efficient way is an entirely different story.

Any advice for your former CNN colleagues who are now working for David Ellison?

Stay focused on the work. It's always the journalism that matters. 
And the truth and the facts and great storytelling will always rise to the top.

We have seen a steady stream of journalists leaving places like CNN and starting their own thing. Do you think that trend accelerates or stalls out as people realize how difficult it is to do solo media for a living?

I'm concerned about this creator economy — which is really about about businesses that have built themselves on the back of YouTube. If you go back to 2016, 2017, a number of really clever, really creative businesses were built on the back of social platforms. When the algorithms changed, it became almost impossible for these businesses to stay afloat. It was hard for us at CNN, but we had a big enough business that we were able to mitigate and ride the wave. For these other companies, it was disastrous. 


I think you're going to see more and more people trying to go out on their own — and that's what scares me. 
Because I think that the sands may begin to shift a little bit.

• Instagram is opening its arms to long-form video again.
• Adam Mosseri, Instagram's top exec, said longer videos will help the app stay "relevant."
• Instagram is testing tools for creators making episodic content. But will it pay for them?

Instagram's top executive, Adam Mosseri, has a plan to keep the platform "culturally relevant" — by making it more like YouTube.

Meta-owned Instagram unveiled an overhaul of long-form video features on Monday, including a test of horizontal videos called "Features." Taken together, the changes make the app feel a lot more like YouTube.

"We want to be the most culturally relevant platform," Mosseri said in an interview with content creators and founders of Press Publish, Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry. "To do that, we just need to show up where people are."

The context: YouTube has become a major hit on TV screens, and there's a growing appetite for Instagram-native shows with recurring episodes.

"Subway Takes," hosted by Kareem Rahma, is a prime example of Instagram's strengths and limits. The show started in 2023 as a short-form interview series and, as it grew, expanded with longer-form cuts on YouTube and the streaming platform Tubi. Instagram, however, is where Rahma's show still has its largest audience of 2.4 million followers.

Instagram doesn't want people to go to YouTube or Tubi to see longer versions of shows like "Subway Takes." That's leaving ad revenue and user engagement on the table. Its new tools are designed to entice creators and viewers to stay on its platform.

Here are Instagram's latest video tools and how creators can use them:

• "Features" keep viewers within the Instagram ecosystem. Instead of leaving Instagram to watch the extended version of an interview or episode, it'll be relatively seamless to stay on Instagram and watch that longer-form content. Instagram's "Features" can be as long as 90 minutes, although the new format is, for now, only available to a limited number of creators in the US and Brazil.
• Instagram is feeding more content to its TV apps. Instagram is also pushing its "Instagram for TV" app further. The app will feature various video content on TV services like Samsung, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, and now Apple TV. People can now watch a feed of content their friends are also liking or resharing on TV.
• Instagram-native shows can label their episodes more clearly with "Series." Within the main Instagram feed, Instagram is testing a way for shows on the app to seamlessly connect episodic content. Eligible creators can add videos to a Series, and a label appears over the content indicating that there are additional episodes. People can then watch those episodes in order from the start. This test is expanding to more countries through the end of the year.
• Clips can directly drive engagement back to the original video. Instead of clipping content and praying that the audience will go the extra mile of clicking on an account and finding the original, longer-form video, Instagram is letting creators link up to 8 clips to one long video.

This isn't Instagram's first time dabbling in long-form content.

In 2018, it launched IGTV, a long-form video format and stand-alone app. In 2020, Instagram rolled out a program that let creators earn money from those videos on IGTV. Four years after launching, the company sunset the IGTV app and shifted its video efforts to Reels.

There are a few key elements missing from Instagram's big leap (back) into long-form video.

You can't watch the video while continuing to scroll through Instagram, or multitask by opening other apps while keeping the Instagram content in a picture-in-picture pop-up. There also aren't automated transcripts and subtitles yet. A spokesperson for Meta told Business Insider that there are plans for these features.

Will creators get a slice of the ad revenue pie?

For creators, one key question and pain point looms: Will Meta share the honeypot?

Mosseri told Rosenblum and Chaudry that Instagram is thinking about ways to test pre-roll and mid-roll ads that could lead to a revenue split. However, he said previous attempts by Instagram to build a creator monetization system comparable to YouTube's Partner Program didn't prove beneficial for the platform.

"We spend more money than we make back by a long shot," Mosseri said of Instagram's previous efforts at broad revenue-sharing programs.

Mosseri said that in its previous iterations of content monetization, creators typically didn't produce more content than they already did for free, and the content they did create tended to be lower quality.

Still, Instagram will need to "figure it out" as it tries to crack longer-form content, Mosseri said.

"I don't think of platform payments or performance-based incentives or bonuses as a revenue driver," Mosseri added. "I'd be psyched to scale them up for any of these formats — as long as we're breaking even."