Netflix $NFLX ( ▲ 0.05% ) just revealed it generated $1.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2025, and the figure was up more than 2.5x year over year.
That’s a real acceleration, especially considering Netflix’s ad-supported tier rollout initially landed with a thud a few years ago.
But zoom out and the bigger story is this: ads are growing fast, but they’re still a tiny piece of the Netflix machine.
Ads are only ~3% of total Netflix revenue
Netflix’s total revenue in 2025 hit $45.2 billion, up 16% vs. 2024.
So the $1.5B ad number works out to a little over 3% of total sales, meaning subscriptions are still doing basically all the heavy lifting.
It’s progress, but Netflix is nowhere near a YouTube-style ad business yet.
What Netflix ads are actually worth per user
If you assume an average 312.5 million subscribers across the year, $1.5B in ad revenue works out to roughly:
~$0.40 per month per global subscriber
But that’s misleading because not everyone is on an ad plan.
If estimates are right that ~40% of Netflix’s active users are on ad-supported tiers, then the ad revenue per ad-tier user is closer to:
~$1 per month per ad-tier user
That’s the key takeaway: Netflix ads are scaling, but the monetization per user is still early innings.
Bottom line
Netflix’s advertising business is finally starting to look real, with revenue up 2.5x in a year.
But even after a record year, ads are still only a rounding error next to subscription revenue, and Netflix still has a long way to go before commercials become a core pillar of the business.