YouTube is owned by Alphabet (the United States, NASDAQ: GOOGL), which acquired the brand on 13 November 2006 for $1.65 billion.[1][2] YouTube was founded in 2005 in San Bruno, California and was independent until 2006.
Evidence: Alphabet Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K filed 2026-02-05, SEC EDGAR, 5 February 2026. Verified from filings; last checked .
YouTube was founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees and bought by Google the following year for $1.65 billion in stock, a price widely called reckless at the time. It is now the second most visited site in the world and a substantial business in its own right.
Sentences about YouTube from Alphabet's latest annual filing[1], copied word for word.
YouTube provides people with entertainment, information, and opportunities to learn something new and helps support the creator economy through the YouTube Partner Program.
Google Services generates revenues primarily by delivering both performance and brand advertising that appears on Google Search & other properties, YouTube, and Google Network partners' properties ("Google Network properties").
A plain count of the times the name appears in the text of each annual report, not counting the start of a sentence. A brand that an owner writes about more is usually one it treats as central. The brand is named less often than it was three years earlier.
Controlling ownership as of . Brands grouped under the entity that owns them; large groups are collapsed.
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See the full Alphabet brand portfolio (13) →
Alphabet controls 13 brands on Brandtree, 13 of them in internet & digital.
The 18 brands in video platforms on Brandtree belong to 13 owners. The largest is Kuaishou, with 2.
Alphabet is a publicly listed company headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States, founded in 1998. Brandtree records 13 brands under its control, and it is listed as NASDAQ: GOOGL.
Alphabet was created in 2015 as a holding company above Google, separating the search and advertising business from ventures such as Waymo and Verily. Google itself was founded in 1998 by two Stanford graduate students, and advertising against search results still produces the overwhelming majority of the group's revenue.
Brandtree records a controlling owner for 2,549 brands that began in the United States. 478 of them (19%) are now controlled by a company headquartered in another country; YouTube is not one of them.
Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, twenty months after the video site was founded and while it still had no meaningful revenue. The price was widely criticised as reckless at the time.
The parent company of YouTube is Alphabet, a publicly listed company headquartered in the United States.
Yes. YouTube originated in the United States in 2005 and its owner, Alphabet, is also headquartered in the United States.
Alphabet completed its acquisition of YouTube on 13 November 2006, after announcing the deal on 9 October 2006. The deal was valued at $1.65 billion.
YouTube was an independent company from its founding in 2005 in San Bruno, California until Alphabet acquired it in 2006.
Yes. As of 9 October 2026, YouTube is still owned by Alphabet. The ownership record was last checked against primary sources on that date.
Last verified . Every ownership fact above is backed by one of these primary documents. Numbers in brackets in the text refer to this list.
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