YouTube CEO Neal Mohan: ‘Still in early days of our growth… want to be the best place to create, share and watch videos’

Indian-American Neal Mohan took charge of YouTube in February 2023 after one of Google's founding employees, Susan Wojcicki, decided to step down.

A Stanford graduate, Mohan became a part of Google, YouTube's parent company, in 2008. Before becoming the CEO, he was the chief product officer of the company.

Speaking to Bloomberg about the video streaming platform's vision for the future, outlook on artificial intelligence and creators' economy, Mohan was optimistic that this is “still early days” for YouTube (YT).

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“I want to be a place where we are the best place to create, to share, to watch, a video that you can think of regardless of where you are in the world or what device you're on. That's my vision. That's the vision for YouTube,” Mohan shared. 

On expanding the business… 

When asked about making YouTube bigger, Mohan said he saw the platform as “its own unique thing” and that the company is “still in the early days" of its "growth story”.

“YouTube's really kind of its own sort of unique thing. We're not a social media platform, we're not traditional media in the sense that we're not linear television. We're really sort of our own thing. And so if we live up to that vision, we think we're really still in the early days of our growth story and fulfilling what our mission is, which is to give everyone a voice and show them the world.” Mohan observed.

He also acknowledged YT surpassing Netflix as the biggest streamer in the world, adding that it is “getting recognised as that platform on television screens”.

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“We just surpassed a billion hours of watch time on living room screens. And the Nielsen ratings is certainly something when I speak to our advertising partners. The brands that look to build connections with consumers on our platform, they recognise that, and they see it as a place not just have this broad reach, but engage (with consumers),” he added.

“Our top creators have grown their watch time on living room screens by something on the order of 400 per cent in the last couple of years or so. And so we're seeing enormous growth. And it really comes down to the fact that people come home, they sit down on their couch, and they want to turn on YouTube, and they want to consume all the content that they know and love on it,” Mohan added.

On YouTube's revenue reaching $15 billion a year and future growth… 

Mohan broke this down into creator economy, ad subscription business and direct fan-funding through channel memberships, stating that there is an “enormous amount of scale and complexity in the ecosystem that requires us to rethink how we're going to support that creator ecosystem”.

“The goal is the same, which is to make our creators successful in our platform in two dimensions — building an audience and being able to earn a sustainable living from our platform,” Mohan said.

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“What we are building for all of us as users of the platform, is the connection between fans and viewers and creators. That is what's ultimately attractive to advertisers. So if you're not focused on that connection between creators and fans, everything that you're doing from an advertiser standpoint is sort of moot,” Mohan pointed out.

He also said monetisation on YouTube is a “long-term game”.

On the business model and creator economy…

Mohan noted that YouTube has 3 million creators in their Partner Program (YPP), which proves that “millions of creators” earn their living on the platform.

On the $70 billion payout to creators over the years, Mohan said that most of this is generated through advertising. “Advertising (video-based demand or AVOD) is our primary business. But increasingly, our subscription video on demand (SVOD) business has grown to be a very meaningful part of our business — that's YouTube Music and YouTube Premium. We also obviously have a YouTube TV subscription business.”

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He added that fan-funding is another means of creator income. “AVOD, SVOD and fan funding direct to consumers generate revenue for our creators, and it's paying off, or time will tell. I mean, our business is successful when our creators' business is successful. So we are really pleased with the size of the creator economy. But I also remind our teams every day that we're still in the very early journey of what this could grow and become,” he added.

On recommendations, Shorts and AI…

About YT's changing recommendations algorithms, Mohan clarified that this is a “reflection of your interests as a viewer”. “So when it's changing, it's reflecting back your interests, or your personalized history of what you are watching on our platform. And that is the simplest way that I can really describe it,” he said.

Mohan stated that the company look to improve viewer experience through innovation and “AI is the industry buzzword”. “Recommendations is one of the areas where we've been investing very heavily in AI, for around a decade,” he said.

On Shorts, Mohan was optimistic but added that it was a growing space in “very very early days.” “The number of creators uploading shorts has grown 50 per cent year on year (YoY). Every single month for the last year since launching our monetisation programme on shorts, creators' earnings have grown every single month. So, lots and lots of success around shorts. But it's still very, very early days,” he added.

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On speculation that Microsoft-backed OpenAI used YouTube videos to train its Sora model, Mohan sought to throw back the question towards Microsoft, but acknowledged that any such use would be against YouTube's terms of service (TOS) agreement. 

“I don't know (if OpenAI used YouTube videos to train Sora). I have no information myself. So I would encourage you to ask them directly,” he said. When pressed about the policy, Mohan stated YT has “clear TOS… (which) does not allow for things like transcripts or videos to be downloaded. And that is a clear violation of our TOS.”

On Google internally using the resource, Mohan said they have “TOS or individual contracts with creators… (and) lots of creators have different sorts of licensing contracts in terms of their content on our platform… (and) may be being used for those models, as per the contract that a creator has signed before uploading their content to YouTube”.

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On the age of AI and misinformation…

Mohan was of the belief that the “technology is here. Can't hide from this”, adding that such paradigm shifts will lead to many amazing opportunities.

He, however, added that in the hands of bad actors, it could facilitate deep fakes or misinformation. “So we have to be cognizant of that. AI is going to play a really big role in actually detecting that type of content, but also all the amazing trained professionals we have all over the world that are reviewing this content,” he added.

On AI and deepfakes during the election year, Mohan said YT has a new policy in place that requires labelling of this sort of content (AI generated). “We won't just stop there. We have when people are looking for election-related information on our platform, we raise up content that comes from channels that have a history of authority, determined by third-party raters that evaluate content from these channels. We have an intelligence desk that is looking for coordinated deceptive practices,” Mohan shared.