The latest entry in the ‘how much money does YouTube make? / how much is YouTube worth as a standalone entity?’ speculation stakes comes from Morgan Stanley.

Its latest note for investors addresses the latter question, and comes up with a suitably big number: $160bn. Actually, it also tackles the former question, suggesting that YouTube will generate $22.9bn of revenues in 2019.

A valuation of $160bn would suggest that YouTube accounts for just over 21% of parent company Alphabet’s market cap.

Morgan Stanley also provided some thoughts on how the new YouTube Music and YouTube Premium subscription tiers will affect the overall business.

“A growing subscription focus…could lead to 13x higher user monetisation,” claimed its report, which went on to suggest that for every million YouTube users that decide to pay for YouTube Music, the service will add 1% of revenues.

That’s the key question, of course: can YouTube persuade even millions (or, indeed, tens of millions) of its one billion music users to start paying?

Stuart Dredge