YouTube is owned by Google, which is itself part of the larger parent company Alphabet Inc.

Quick Scoop: Who Owns YouTube?

  • The legal owner of YouTube is Google LLC.
  • Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., a big publicly traded tech holding company.
  • YouTube was originally founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, then bought by Google in 2006 for about 1.65 billion dollars.
  • Today, YouTube is run as one of Google’s major products, with overall control sitting at Alphabet’s top level (board, major shareholders, and executives).

A bit of story

YouTube started as a small startup built by three former PayPal employees in 2005, mainly as a simple way to upload and share videos online. The idea took off so fast that within about a year, Google moved in and acquired the company, locking in YouTube as the core of its video and streaming strategy. Over time, Alphabet was created as Google’s parent company, and YouTube came along inside that new structure as one of its flagship platforms.

Who really “controls” it?

Because Alphabet is a public company, millions of investors technically own small pieces of the business, including YouTube, through their shares. However, Google co‑founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hold special voting shares that give them effective control over Alphabet, and therefore over Google and YouTube. Big financial institutions like Vanguard and BlackRock are also major shareholders, but they do not have as much voting power as the founders’ special stock.

In simple terms: YouTube belongs to Google; Google sits under Alphabet; and Alphabet is controlled primarily by its founders and large shareholders.

TL;DR: If you’re asking “who is the owner of YouTube,” the everyday answer is: Google (under Alphabet Inc.).

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.