Good morning,
This week’s Stratechery Interview is with YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. Mohan joined Google as part of the DoubleClick acquisition in 2007, and became the Senior Vice President of Display and Video Ads. Then, in 2015, Mohan moved to YouTube to become Chief Product Officer, and succeeded Susan Wojcicki as CEO in 2023.
The occasion for this interview was yesterday’s Made on YouTube 2025, YouTube’s annual product announcement event; unsurprisingly, this year’s announcements were extremely AI-centric. The announcements included:
- Using Veo 3 to create video backgrounds for shorts, converting raw footage to coherent videos, and speech to song.
- Significant updates to live streaming and podcasting, including the ability to generate relevant video for audio-only podcasts
- New brand collaboration offerings and AI-enabled auto-tagging for product placements
I attended the event, and interviewed Mohan in person. One thing that was very interesting about the event is that many of the features were introduced and demoed not by YouTube executives, but by creators; it was a powerful endorsement of the unique relationship YouTube has with the creator community.
In this interview Mohan and I discuss his background, including his vision for DoubleClick that informed Google’s approach to web advertising for years, how YouTube wants to use AI to enhance creators (and not replace them), YouTube monetization, the difference between a platform and creators, and the company’s attempted takeover of the living room TV.
As a reminder, all Stratechery content, including interviews, is available as a podcast; click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player.
On to the Interview:
An Interview with YouTube CEO Neal Mohan About Building a Stage for Creators
This interview is lightly edited for content and clarity.
Background
Neal Mohan, welcome to Stratechery.
Neal Mohan: Thank you for having me, Ben. Great to be here.
So we’re in New York City talking shortly after your keynote at the Made On YouTube event. Before I get into that, I wanted to share an interesting anecdote, at least interesting to me.
Last night, I told a friend that I was in New York City for something YouTube related. I couldn’t remember the name of the event, so I searched on Google, naturally, for “YouTube event New York City 2025” and various permutations of that, and I actually did not find it, I never messaged him back, I waited until I got here today, “Oh yeah, Made on YouTube”. What struck me about this anecdote is not that YouTube isn’t a big deal, obviously it’s a massive deal, or that this event didn’t matter. It was the opposite in that it seems like there’s almost a total disconnect between YouTube and the online world of creators that you’ve fostered, and traditional media, which Google still draws from for things like news and search results, stuff like that. Do you see that disconnect and what’s it like being on the other side of it?
NM: It’s interesting. When we conceived — this is our fourth year doing Made on YouTube — and when we conceived of it, we really thought of it as a place to showcase our innovation. Hopefully you saw a lot of that today from a product standpoint, but really more through for and through the lens of our creators, the YouTubers. The lens that which we look at Made on YouTube and how the features are received, who knows about it, is really through that creator community.
Right, it’s like this completely parallel ecosystem that me being more in traditional media is like, “There’s something going on over there”, and you almost fail to appreciate the magnitude and volume.
NM: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say is that yes, it’s this ecosystem, this creator ecosystem, you can say it’s parallel, but happens to be a lot of, as you saw with those creators that are in the audience, have tens and tens of millions of followers.
You could be parallel and be much larger!
NM: Exactly.
Well, tell me about your background, I always like to get into this when I talk to someone new. Where’d you grow up? What was your path to technology? Did you have ambitions to be the steward of culture, even if the traditional world was missing what was happening under their noses?
NM: Yeah, I grew up in the Midwest, was I was born in Indiana, my dad was doing his PhD at Purdue, so I was born to grad students in Indiana. I grew up most of my childhood in Michigan, outside of Ann Arbor.
So, are you a Purdue fan or a Michigan fan?
NM: I’m a Michigan fan, but I love Purdue, I took our three kids there for the first time to see where dad was born, and that was a lot of fun. I’m a Michigan fan.
But I grew up in the Midwest, kind of very typical childhood, this is now we’re talking kind of late ’70s, early ’80s, so lots of Transformers and GI Joes and Little League baseball and that kind of a thing. And right as I was about getting ready for high school, my parents moved back to India and so, that was a culture shock for me.
Everyone thinks about culture shock in this direction, but you go back and you look like you’re Indian, but you’ve grown up-
NM: Definitely don’t sound that way!
That’s right.
NM: So that was quite the experience. I had to learn nine grades worth of Hindi, and all that from a language standpoint, but just culturally, it was different. I could understand the language, I couldn’t read it or write it or speak it, and you obviously fast-forward, and some of my best friends are from that time period, it was obviously a transformational time in my life, and then I came back.
Is there a bit, by the way, where we’re talking about these ecosystem, these creators, you can understand their language? Do you feel like you can speak it or did you have to have a crash course there as well?
NM: You mean like the creator lingo?
Yes.
NM: Yeah, actually, the common thread that I was going to get to is the fact that you asked about steward of culture or what have you, the common thread actually through my childhood was the way that I actually was able to connect with, whether it’s a new community of friends, or fitting into a completely different place on the other side of the world, was actually through things like media and culture.
If there’s any common thread through my life it really is the fact that I love consuming stories, I love contributing to stories and so whether it’s movies, or books, or sports, or creators in today’s world, that has really been a common thread.
I happen to be lucky enough to combine it with my love of technology. One of the things that I remember fondly about my high school days in India is I had this tiny little software company that I started on my own, and it was basically educational software, I built programs that taught kids, of all things, organic chemistry. So it was really those two things, my love of technology, programming, computers, and then this deep love I’ve always had of media of every form that has been turned out to be, and it wasn’t by anything I planned, a common thread throughout my career.
So, you came back to the US for college then?
NM: Yeah, I came back to college at Stanford, I studied electrical engineering, and I graduated from Stanford right in the mid-90s. And in that sense, I think actually back to this love of media and technology, it was an incredibly fortuitous time to be coming into my professional career. It was really the dawn of the Internet, dotcom 1.0, every type of company, including media companies, were figuring out what this new medium actually was, and how they were going to take advantage of it, launch a website, all that sort of a thing, and that’s when I started my working life.
In retrospect, what was the biggest misconception that everyone had way back when?
NM: Oh, I think that there were probably, I’m sure there were many of them. Certainly from my standpoint, a lot of it was that a lot of what people understood to be the case in the media world that existed in television for decades or print for centuries would continue forward in the same way in the digital, in the Internet world, and many things did, like the advertising business model or what have you, but there were many things that were very different. The biggest, of course being the marginal cost of production of content and those types of things.
And also everyone having access, everyone was like, “Oh, finally we don’t have any geographic limitations“, and then “Oh no, we don’t have any more geographic limitations“.
NM: Yeah, and again, look, I’m an optimist always, I think on balance that was a great thing for human beings and societies, etc. But of course, it came with other types of considerations if you look back on the last 30 years.
DoubleClick
I want to ask about DoubleClick. You were there, then you went to business school, then you went back, was that the cycle there?
NM: When I graduated from college in the mid-90s, I went to work for a consulting firm, and one of the things I quickly realized, that was I wanted to jump into one of these startups. It was an incredibly frothy time in terms of new technologies, incredibly exciting time to be in Silicon Valley, and I went to work for one of them, it was a company called NetGravity. It was one of the very first Internet advertising technology companies, they worked with many of the companies of the dotcom 1.0 days, like the GeoCities or Broadcast.com’s of the world and NetGravity and DoubleClick merged, that’s how I ended up at DoubleClick.
And there, I got to build some of the foundational Internet advertising technology that frankly exists to this day at DoubleClick. I had worked there for a few years, was working in New York City, decided to go back to business school, went back to Stanford for my MBA, and I was looking at a number of companies out of business school, and then DoubleClick called me again.
They were then sort of hitting rough times at that point, right?
NM: Well, the dotcom bubble burst around 2000, 2001, I was at business school and basically what happened was DoubleClick was getting taken private, and so it was essentially a chance to reinvest in the company, focus on what its core mission was, which was building this advertising technology software, and so there was an opportunity really basically to be the second in command at the company, coming out of business school, to be responsible for building all the products, to lead the product management team, etc., and so that’s what I did.
So, there’s this legendary slide deck you created, I believe the word is it 400 slides long. As a pedant, I must ask, what were the exact number of slides? Was it actually 400, or was it like 402, or 398…?
NM: (laughing) I don’t really remember and I’m sure it had a very large appendix too. But I do remember putting that together, it was, like you said, it was kind of like DoubleClick was the poster child of dotcom 1.0, I remember we had this giant billboard in Silicon Valley, right down the road here, saying, “DoubleClick welcomes you to Silicon Valley”. Then obviously the bottom fell out of that first phase of the Internet economy, and so the company needed a strategy as it was being taken private about what this new DoubleClick was going to look like in the dotcom 2.0 world. And so, that’s what I put together.
What was the strategy?
NM: It was really around the notion that, just like as you said, access and distribution of all of this amazing content was going to be widely available, to all of us as consumers. It meant that the advertising solutions also needed to be open and broadly available, and that became the basis of how we thought about the DoubleClick business, building solutions that were going to allow publishers, web publishers at the time, do what they needed to do to grow their businesses, but at the same time also enabling easy access, scaled access to brands and advertisers to be able to connect with that inventory.
Right, without having to do one-to-one deals continuously.
NM: Moving away from the old model of the cliché Madison Avenue type model of, “You go out to lunch and you negotiate a deal and it’s bespoke in this particular fashion because you were friends with the head of ad sales at that particular publisher”. So doing away with that model, and really frankly, democratizing the way advertising worked, which in our thesis, back to this kind of strategy book, would result in higher ROI for publishers, but also better ROI for advertisers.
You’re not in that space anymore, you are obviously in the advertising space, but as far as the web and where DoubleClick still plays within Google, but looking from afar, or across campus as it were, what do you think the future of display advertising and the web generally is? There’s a lot of consternation in the age of AI, if you were back in that space, what would be your take?
NM: Yeah. I haven’t been responsible for those products coming up on 10 years now.
We won’t hold you to it!
NM: I think that it’s, at the end of the day, ultimately what this comes down to is just like the many amazing creators that you saw today, there has to be a means to sustain that amazing creativity in content production, and it turns out that if you are doing that at scale, one of the best models to do that is advertising because that’s what makes that creativity, that content accessible in the first place.
Everyone wants attention. The creators want attention, the advertisers want attention.
NM: But we all as consumers want access to amazing content, and the best way to do that at scale is through an advertising model. That has remained true throughout every iteration of media.
Did you have to be a real salesman for advertising within Google? To be like, “No, look, advertising is good actually, it’s not a necessary evil, it’s something that is actually broadly beneficial to everyone”?
NM: Well, I have to say, Ben, one of the things that I get excited about, you walk the halls of YouTube, you’re going to hear the term “creator” and “content creator” 100 times a day and the common thread between my role leading YouTube today and what I’m describing in terms of my early career at DoubleClick and at Google is this mission to serve these content creators, whether they’re publishers, whether they’re media companies, whether they’re musicians and artists or creators, and the means to do that is actually not just helping them find audiences, but actually to help them build businesses. The way that you can do that at scale in the media world turns out to be through advertising solutions, that’s what keeps that content freely available to fans like you and me.
YouTube and AI
You talked a lot about AI in today’s presentation, and emphasized how you saw it as a tool to enable creation, but that creators are still in control. It felt like you were trying to walk a little bit of a tightrope there, so I’ll give you another chance to articulate the message about the balance between creators and AI.
NM: One of the interesting things about leading YouTube is that we’re this organization that — we’re a company that’s deeply rooted in Silicon Valley, right? Most of the people that work for me are software engineers, technologists. As you saw today, we pride ourselves on product innovation and being at the cutting edge of innovation, whether it’s the living room or what have you, mobile podcasts, etc.
But we’re also a company that faces the creative industries every single day, everything that we build is in service of people that are creative people, and I use the term “creator” writ large. YouTubers, artists, musicians, sports leagues, media, Hollywood, etc., and from that vantage point, it is really exceedingly clear that these AI capabilities are just that, they’re capabilities, they’re tools. But the thing that actually draws us to YouTube, what we want to watch are the original storytellers, the creators themselves.
It’s, in my view, not very different than when the drum machine was invented or the synthesizer was invented and I’m old enough to remember when some of those technologies were coming out, people would say, “Well, there goes music, how could you be creative with literally this computer thing that’ll spit out the music that you’re looking for?”. You fast-forward decades forward, and of course that’s not the case. What people are interested in is the music that comes from Dua Lipa, who you saw today, because it’s her, it’s authentic to her, she created it, it’s her voice, it’s her style and if she uses a bunch of tools to do that, that’s kind of besides the point.
That’s the point that I was trying to make about AI. I’m a technologist, it’s amazing what these technologies can do, you saw that through the eyes of these creators, but it really is a tool to serve them.
What’s the more important AI story? The fact that you can use AI to make YouTube videos or the fact that YouTube videos are maybe the single most valuable source of data for AI?
NM: There’s lots and lots of sources of information on which AI technologies are built. I think the interesting story there is, again, just the use of these amazing — these tools are amazing — literally being able to type in an idea and out of thin air produce an amazing video that perhaps millions of people will watch, that is amazing.
But I really think the true amazing thing is that you take that same tool and you put it in the hands of two different people, you’re going to get two very different results. One of them might generate tens millions of views and set the culture, another one might be relegated to kind of the dustbin of history and that’s the point, which is at the end of the day, it’s about the creative person who’s in charge using these tools as opposed to the other way around.
Something that occurs to me is that YouTube is almost insulated from the AI slop concerns by virtue of the fact you’re already overwhelmed with content. I think the latest number is 500 hours of content is uploaded every minute. And to your point, the reality is of all the videos that go on YouTube, yes, some hit millions, the vast majority are relegated to the proverbial dustbin. Does that give you confidence that you actually already have systems and algorithms in place to navigate this? And you have the luxury of, “Yeah, generate all you want, we’ll find what’s good and don’t need to worry about the rest”?
NM: Yeah, I should have you articulate this problem and the solution, you did it very crisply there because that’s precisely been my experience. Which is yes, look, these tools will make content production easier, will put capabilities in the hands of people who otherwise wouldn’t have had these capabilities. All of that is true just like the very first YouTube video did 20 years ago, but that’s all they’re going to do.
On the other side of that, you could have an incredibly powerful culture setting video or one that’s forgettable and our systems, I always describe a lot of what YouTube is, in essence is it’s the world’s best connector of an interesting, amazing creative idea with their fans no matter where their fans are in the world. And in an AI world, that’s going to remain true. As a result, the systems as you’re describing that we’ve built to deal with things like spammy content or some other sort of repetitive and all that sort of type of content should come into play here to deal with this question of AI slop.
Now, it doesn’t mean that producing that type of content hasn’t gotten cheaper or easier, of course it has with these tools, but you’re precisely right that we have some history of being able to deal with this in a way where the user experience is preserved. So that’s what I’m going to rely on to make sure that we stay ahead of this.
I think the last point that I’ll make on this is we’re talking about this in the context of AI, but it really goes back to the fact that these AIs are just tools, so by having it be created by AI should say nothing about really what the quality of what that end product is.
YouTube, Creators, and Monetization
Who was the audience for this presentation and who are the audience for some of these tools that you introduced? Are they the same? The auditorium had established creators with established workflows. You can call back to how they started and you had a little montage of some of the creators there, and there were first videos and things like that, and one of the presenters talked about he had pirated software in his computer and you could make something happen, and now they’re just getting better and better. But is there a bit of tension that what you’re actually doing is creating tools for the future competitors of everybody in that room?
NM: Yeah, that’s super interesting and that creator’s story, Brandon’s story, is amazing because you fast-forward just a few years, Brandon has 16 million subscribers on YouTube. He is a worldwide phenomenon, and I take immense pride in having given him that stage to go do that, but the creativity was all Brandon.
I’ve been at YouTube a very long time coming up on 10 years, but one of the things that I personally value a lot at YouTube is the culture that exists amongst the YouTubers, and so I never hear from any of our big creators or even middle-sized creators that say, “Oh, well if you do this, then it’s going to weaken my position in this particular way”.
The ethos of YouTube is the opposite of that. Some of the biggest creators starting with MrBeast on down are pushing me, they’re some of the first people to push me on, “Hey Neal, you’ve got to make sure that this is something that is going to be widely applicable and usable by other up-and-coming creators as well”.
I think it’s a culture that comes from abundance and what there is on YouTube is there is an abundance of viewers, it’s hard for people to comprehend how many people are out there. I thought about this when I was doing Stratechery originally and had people say, “Oh, yeah, no one’s going to pay for content”, and then you fast-forward, it was like, “Subscription fatigue, blah, blah, blah”, and they’re stuck in, “How many things am I willing to pay for?”, and it’s very hard for people to comprehend just how many people there are in the world. When you’re on a platform where it’s all free thanks to the ads, it’s like, “What are we competing for?”, it’s kind of an infinite pool.
NM: By the way, we do have subscription models as well. So one of my goals is to get Stratechery on YouTube.
I’ll tell you exactly why I’m not on there.
NM: I’m sure you will.
I’ll tell you right now. The problem is YouTube is YouTube and you have your subscription product, it doesn’t link to anything on the outside, I can’t even get an email address. If my core product is a written product, I can’t link them together.
NM: That’s fair enough.
Yes. But is that a strategic imperative? YouTube has to be self-contained, it’s its own world, and why not? It’s so big.
NM: I think the strategic imperative is more around the fact that we are really first and foremost about video and audio to the extent that it follows the form factor of video and that’s our strength and our focus, and we are doing a lot of different things, but one way for us to stay focused is to be the world’s leading platform for creating, sharing, and watching video. And that’s our bread and butter.
I’d love to have my subscription including subscription video on there, you know how to reach me.
NM: All right, well, we’ll have a conversation offline.
There was another potential source of tension in this presentation. A lot of people in the room make the majority of their money, which was acknowledged on stage, not from YouTube ads, but rather from brand placements. Now YouTube wants to get into that game. You joked about this in the question-and-answer when you were asked about it, but is there a sense that there’s a lot of money being made here and, “We’re not getting a share of it and we’d like to get a little bit of a cut”?
NM: Let me take a step back to put some context on that.
So as I said, the nice thing about the YouTube business model is that it is ensures almost complete alignment with the creators that are on our platform. We have the YouTube Partner Program, millions of creators are in it, and it’s a rev share model, so the more revenue we generate through ads, the more our creators generate. Obviously there’s conversations about what that cut should be, etc, it’s 55-45, but that’s important context when you think about things like brand deals and brand sponsorships, because while that ad revenue forms a meaningful part of revenue for many creators, there are also many creators who generate a very substantial amount of revenue through these brand sponsorships and sometimes the majority of their revenue through that. Not always, but maybe sometimes.
My goal, our goal, is to make it so that we’ve invested in this creator economy in a way where the creators feel empowered to keep producing great content, that’s where the flywheel starts, that’s the core piece. So if by investing in brand deals through whether it’s the dynamic brand mentions product or anything else that we do in that space, that’s the first thing that we’re looking to do is to basically make it so that creators can generate enough revenue to produce the amazing content that they’re doing.
The second thing, which is a little subtler, is that when we know about those brand deals in the videos themselves, then we can make sure that the viewer experience, all of our experiences as fans is preserved because then we can make decisions about where the ad should show up, where the mid-roll should show up, in a way that takes that those interruptions into account, and that’s a big user benefit.
And in my experience, having been at YouTube for 10 years, CEO for the last 3, is if you take care of the creator and the viewer piece, then the advertiser piece really does get addressed, because now you have leaned-in viewers, motivated creators, and that translates into better ROI for advertisers. Now if we do that, that’s basically the YouTube ecosystem in a nutshell, and that is the strategic imperative behind our investment in brand deals.
There’s some of the AI features that will grab the headlines, like the Veo-created shorts making songs out of rants or whatever, that was super fun. The one that jumped out to me though, and it’s kind of in-line with this discussion, was auto-tagging, where you can tag an item in a video that a creator’s trying to sell, instead of them having to go manually and figure it out and add the appropriate link, they can click and do whatever.
This has long struck me as one of the largest monetization opportunities for both you and Meta. How long until you tag everything? I can imagine a system, your copyright system — which is absolutely brilliant — where instead of videos getting taken down because there are copyrighted songs in there, the copyright owner just gets monetized through doing that. You could imagine a world where actually everything in a video is tagged and people can come along and see how many items they have tagged across YouTube and, “Do you want bid on having links put in there?”. Is that on the roadmap?
NM: That specific idea, we’re not quite there yet. I mean, I think right now, as you saw, we’re taking some of the first steps towards this.
Yeah, sorry, I’m jumping to the end game.
NM: No, no, your product vision is definitely on the right track there. But implicit in your product idea is kind of like a question about what actually happens on YouTube, and before I answer the specific question around auto-tagging, I just want to say that the lens through which we look at shopping and commerce on YouTube is not necessarily just about a business opportunity for YouTube, and also therefore for our creators — of course it is that — but actually from the viewer’s perspective.
What I mean by that is just like we would go to the mall with our friends and family on a Saturday afternoon, and you didn’t have any specific shopping list in mind, it was entertainment just as much as it was shopping. That user journey exists on YouTube, millions, tens of millions of times a day and so it’s really about serving that particular use case. That’s where auto-tagging comes in to basically make it so that videos have information about products and one of the biggest challenges — and we’ve been trying this by the way, for three or four years without auto-tagging — one of the biggest challenges we heard from creators is that it’s kind of a pain to actually do that manually in videos.
One way to scale it now that the AI has gotten so good that we can do it at pretty high precision is through auto-tagging, and so that’s why we’re so excited about it. You saw the excitement in the room from the creators around it.
Yep.
NM: They think it’s a big opportunity, but none of those creators are going to be doing it just for the sake of selling products because they have to be truly authentic to their fans. So I bet you when you talk to creators about shopping, they think about it more as a means to connect with fans first and foremost, and then a commerce opportunity.
But isn’t the even bigger potential that no one has to think about it at all, stuff is just monetized by virtue of being there?
NM: Yeah, I think so. But I think creators will still think about it because they sweat the details of what their fans are thinking about and how their fans engage, and so back to this theme of the AI will be a tool for the creators, but the creators are still really going to be in charge because they get to set the tone in terms of how that engagement happens with their fans. And if they want to turn that off for a particular video or they want to do it for only one product that they’re super excited about, that’s how they’re going to do it.
The YouTube Stage
I do have to note, by the way, in February, you wrote a blog post about YouTube’s big bets for 2025. There wasn’t a video, where is Neal Mohan, YouTube star?
NM: So I do have a YouTube channel, it is a channel where there isn’t a lot of video, there is some video on it. One of the things I’ve learned in my time at YouTube is I have not even 1% of the talent that a lot of these YouTubers and creators that you saw there today have and that’s just the reality that I think I have to live with (laughing).
And is that a mismatch that you think about? Because it makes sense to me, what makes YouTube possible is that it is the platform for creators, which means you actually have to be totally different from creators in every way. You need massive scale, you need massive automation, it has to be no touch, not even low touch, and yet do it all. That’s the way to unlock this individual creativity and the massive, a gazillion flowers or a lot of spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. Is the way to think about YouTube that you are just a market maker and you’re really letting the market do its thing and who sells in the market is different than who makes the market?
NM: The way I think about YouTube is really back to this metaphor of a stage. What I know how to do, what my teams know how to do is build the world’s best stage, like the best seats in the house, the best lighting, the best camera angles, that is our focus. That’s what we’re really, really good at.
The people who are on the stage are those creative geniuses and that’s what they’re really good at and so what the dependency that they have on us is, “Hey, Neal, that stage better be really, really good, it better be a great experience for my fans, first and foremost, so build that”.
You steward creativity by creating the conditions for it, not actually trying to have a heavy hand on it.
NM: And look, as I was saying, just when we were talking about my background, I’m a fan, I love what these creators do. Even if I wasn’t in charge of YouTube, I’d be watching a lot of YouTube and a lot of creators. That’s what I enjoy doing, whatever niche it is, and that’s where a lot of my motivation comes from.
You spent a lot of time when you were the Chief Product Officer focused on trust and safety issues, your critics might say censorship, and have noted that it’s important to point to and elevate authoritative sources when it comes to news and controversial issues. Isn’t that kind of counter to the YouTube ethos, though? Authoritative sources wouldn’t be on stage helping you present, the reality is YouTube is like the partnership between the stage and the people on the stage and millions of individuals. You’re running this pincer movement on traditional media, so why does traditional media deserve special deference in this case?
NM: I don’t think — that certainly wasn’t the intent, nor how the actual system worked. And I mean, again, this happens to be our 20th birthday this year for YouTube and YouTube, starting from that very first 19-second video, Me at the zoo, when it was uploaded, was all about giving everyone a voice and showing them the world.
That’s our mission statement. It’s very, very simple. I love it because it encapsulates what YouTube is all about. Those creators that you saw and talk to today, they know that they would not have existed if YouTube wasn’t a place that stood for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and no gatekeepers. Nobody got to tell them that they didn’t look the right way or they didn’t sound the right way, or they were from the wrong part of the world, or their idea wasn’t interesting, they got to put it out there and if it passed muster with an audience, then it had an audience and that’s the magic of YouTube.
So whatever vertical we talk about, it is about that next generation of creativity that’s coming about. And by the way, many of them are YouTubers, but increasingly there are people who are embracing YouTube that have come from other parts of the industry, other industries or what have you and that’s also amazing. We are the world’s largest podcasting platform.
You’re the ultimate video aggregator.
NM: We’re a big podcasting platform. Well, a lot of our podcasters are YouTubers and a lot of our successful podcasters have come from other industries, whether they were athletes, whether they came from traditional television, but what’s common is that they’ve all found a home on YouTube and they get to control their audience and they get to control their business.
YouTube on TV
One of your big bets, an ongoing one, is that YouTube is the next television. And to be clear, that’s a goal that is already a huge success. You’re the biggest streaming service in the world, not just generally, but in the living room specifically. How much of that is due to traditionally what you might think of what you would watch in TV? Or is that really just a YouTube story, YouTube-specific content that’s been carrying you in the living room?
NM: I think a couple things. First is, I would say, first and foremost, it’s consumer-driven. I think that we in the industry don’t get to tell consumers what the next TV is, consumers decide that and increasingly consumers, especially young consumers and viewers, expect to have all of their favorite content in one place, whether it’s their favorite YouTuber, whether it’s a 15-second Short, whether it’s a livestream gamer, whether it’s an NFL game, whether it’s highlights from last night’s Warriors game, NBA highlights, or what have you. A young watcher of television expects their TV to be all of those types of things and in many ways, that’s what YouTube is. So that was driven by consumers. We saw this trend, I would say nearly a decade ago, well before COVID actually.
Is this is the driver for YouTube TV?
NM: I’ll come back to the YouTube TV thing in a second.
But the driver for YouTube in the living room really was starting to see some of the shoots of this interest from consumers first and foremost, especially young consumers, and then we really leaned into it from a product innovation standpoint.
One of the biggest challenges in television is that it’s an extremely fragmented heterogeneous ecosystem, so how do you make YouTube work at a certain quality level seamlessly across device manufacturers, OEMs, etc.? We invested in that, we also invested in bringing the interactivity that you know and expect on mobile phones and tablets and desktop of YouTube to the living room experience. And then finally, we invested in taking advantage of that big canvas so that things like 4K looked beautiful, that you had episodic content, that you had full bleed channel previews, and things like that.
So there was an enormous amount of product and technical innovation that we leaned into when we saw some of those consumers trends and then we did see a spike obviously during COVID when people were at home, but that has persisted past COVID and had started before COVID. So that’s the journey that I always say that that’s like a overnight success that was many, many years in the making.
YouTube TV was related, but was a little bit different and actually when we first built YouTube TV, we had this inclination that a lot of the watch time would be on television screens, but we also built it for mobile. Really the genesis of YouTube TV was there’s a particular type of content that you can’t enjoy on YouTube in the way that you can enjoy your favorite creators, Dude Perfect or Michelle Khare or who have you, and that’s live sports and news. So there was a lot of people, including a lot of the people that worked on that core YouTube TV team that happened to be sports lovers, me included, and so it was really from the standpoint of, “If we could reinvent the TV watching experience from scratch, how would we do it?”, and that’s where YouTube TV came from, and that’s why it’s such a beloved product for millions of subscribers.
Part of the problem though is a lot of the sports are leaving TV, so was this sort of a belated wake-up? Why were you so late to get into selling access to other streaming services and why don’t you have more? Are you now too much of a threat and it’s hard to get everyone on board?
NM: Well, I think it’s important to put YouTube TV in the context of broader YouTube. And actually, Ben, you’ve written about this a little bit, which is there’s YouTube TV, what I think is a great product in that sort of traditional linear television ecosystem with a lot of our traditional partners, those partners are some of our biggest partners.
And then you obviously have YouTube over here, kind of everything from 15-second Shorts, 15-hour live streams, but we also have this product that we have been investing in that’s still relatively small that we need to do more with called Primetime Channels. So the way you can think about that is that those are three products on a continuum. You’ve got linear, then you’ve got the full-fledged YouTube world, and then you have Primetime Channels, which is the idea being, “What if you could take your favorite programming that you used to watch in this particular bundled type scenario and perhaps watch it on us per service?”, sort of a la carte type basis through YouTube where you’re already watching all of your favorite content and that’s Primetime Channels.
So it’s really to show that in order to actually deliver on our vision of all things video, you needed all three of those pieces in a continuum and so it’s a long answer to your question, but it hopefully gives you some direction in terms of how we’re thinking about the evolution of the ecosystem.
What I want as a sports fan, I’m waiting for someone to build my sports aggregator where I have the grid of sports that’s on, I click it and it shows it, whether it’s on YouTube, whether it’s on Peacock, whether it’s on ESPN, wherever it might be. No one seems to have the pieces to do this other than you, so when’s it launching?
NM: Well, knowing you, I think you’ll figure something out here.
NM: Yes, I know you do. What I would say though is, well, I’ll say today, if you’re a sports fan today, I would argue that one of the places where you can get the most complete package of the sports that you love, if it’s the NFL, college football, NBA, etc, is in fact YouTube TV.
That’s right. The MVPDs are actually still the best way to get sports.
NM: So if you have YouTube TV plus Sunday Ticket, you basically have every single game except for maybe Thursday night, but you have all of Sunday, you obviously have Monday, and you can pick and choose and watch them in multi-view.
But shouldn’t you be able to click on the Thursday night game and if I don’t have a Prime membership, you’re happy to sell it to me?
NM: Well, there’s other parties that are involved in that, but that’s again, back to my answer around where YouTube TV fits and where perhaps something like Primetime Channels fits. So for example, take the NFL—
While you answer this, you can give me the overall story for NFL Sunday Ticket. A lot of my colleagues and analysts think you dramatically overpaid, I’ve been a defender, but tell me the overall thinking process.
NM: Actually this is a perfect segue because what I was going to say is that one of the most successful Primetime Channel subscriptions within YouTube, YouTube, the main app, is actually Sunday Ticket and that’s an example how we thought about Sunday Ticket. So the thought behind it was taking a step back is we have tens of millions, if not more, sports fans on YouTube every single day, all over the world. The NFL, to their credit, had been investing in their YouTube channel for well over a decade.
A great YouTube channel, they have these great ten-minute summaries of every game.
NM: Amazing, amazing.
Fantastic.
NM: They have really leaned into it and they built up that channel, so they had some understanding of YouTube. We obviously had some understanding of sports, including the NFL and you know, the conversations around Sunday Ticket actually began years ago. I remember [NFL Commissioner] Roger Goodell and I were talking about what the future of sports could look like way before COVID and the reason why we did Sunday Ticket was really threefold. First and foremost was to super-serve that fan base, those tens of millions of sports fans that are on YouTube every single day. And one of the big ways that we did it was actually make it really easy to access Sunday Ticket.
You don’t have to get a satellite dish.
NM: You don’t have to have somebody install a dish on your house, exactly. With two taps on your phone, you can subscribe to Sunday Ticket.
The other thing was you don’t have to buy it with a bundle. If you want to purchase it with YouTube TV so that you get Sunday Ticket alongside your local broadcast games, then you can do that. But if you wanted to buy it fully a la carte independently, you could do that for the first time ever. So that’s this Primetime Channels SKU that exists on YouTube, that’s reason number one.
Reason number two was again, back to product innovation, YouTube innovation, we didn’t want to do it if we couldn’t actually put a YouTube stamp on it. And as you know, some of the most beloved features of Sunday Ticket are things like Multiview, which now lots and lots of other services are trying to do, but that was one of the killer features of season one. Things like key plays, things like some of the fantasy integrations, that product innovation was really, really key.
Then the third, and I would argue most important reason, and you saw some of this perhaps in the Brazil game that we just carried a few days ago was how we brought the creator ecosystem to the table. That’s obviously great for our creators to get access to this amazing NFL content, but I would argue that it’s great for the NFL and most importantly for sports fans. If you think about a young sports fan, they consume their highlights and a lot of their sports through the lens of these creators, whether it’s destroying, you saw The Watch with IShowSpeed, you saw MrBeast as part of the actual telecast of the game, and to the NFL’s credit, they have been prescient. They have, despite being the king of the hill, they have looked ahead and seen that and they know that when their content is consumed on YouTube, it is a younger fan, a substantially younger fan. So all three of those reasons are the reason why we invested in Sunday Ticket.
You mentioned Multiview. I thought one of the interesting takeaways from that was, it was a commentary on sports and TV in general, it was a monopoly in that you had to get the bundle and that’s the way it was delivered and you had a big increase in quality when HD came along and then it’s been really stagnant since then. What I appreciated about that is just suddenly I think it blew everyone’s mind, there’s actually still so much innovation that can be done in the actual presentation of the product.
NM: Yeah, I think that that is true, that’s why I was so proud to get this feedback from these incredibly avid sports fans through that first season.
I remember the first day you did it, I was listening, I think the Bill Simmons Podcast or something, he spent like 30 minutes just talking about Multiview.
NM: Bill loves Multiview and sends me his feature requests. So yeah, that was super exciting, and that was great obviously for YouTube’s viewers, but I’d argue that it’s great for sports leagues as well.
Another example of this was again, back to this Brazil game. The first time, the big innovation there, again thanks to the NFL, but also what YouTube was able to do, which is for the first time ever a game freely available, freely accessible to 2 billion people that come to YouTube all over the world, free of charge. But we wanted to make sure, my team wanted to make sure, that first and foremost, it was a beautiful high-quality experience and I hope you noticed the picture was beautiful.
It was gorgeous, I commented on that. I actually thought it was 4k, I believe it was 1080p actually.
NM: Correct. But it was a full game in 1080p.
It was amazing what a difference it was.
NM: Thank you, it looked beautiful.
The Everything Service
So what’s the balance here? I mean, I had my question here, I was going to put at the end my griping about YouTube being too contained, “Can you just give subscriber’s email addresses?”, but you have this amazing resource, you have all these creators that are only on YouTube, but you have these big investments in traditional media. Is it just a sense that, look, because we have this exclusive content that gives us the foundation to have it all, and how do you balance that with staying true to your roots? Or is the flywheel just spinning so rapidly now that in some respects things are getting easier, you can actually ship faster, which I feel like you’ve been doing?
NM: Well, thank you. Like I said, our goal, my team’s goal, first and foremost, is to ship and to keep shipping and shipping new products. You saw 30 new product innovations today, our goal is to have that cadence continue throughout the course of the year, and I think we have been able to prove that out over the last several years and so that always remains the top priority.
I would say that it is an incredibly dynamic time in the industry, as you know, you have written about this so much, and I would say it’s one of the most competitive times in the industry as well, but I think that competition is great, because ultimately it leads to a set of better products for you and me as fans and watchers of amazing content. That is the world that we live in today, one of the core aspects of that is just the blurring of these boundaries.
The nice thing about the YouTube model, from a creator’s perspective, is yes, first and foremost, it’s this rev share model, your business grows as your success grows on YouTube, you don’t just license over the content and you’re done. But the other aspect of it, that’s very important, is you continue to own those rights. No one at YouTube ever actually tells you what to do with that particular video or your content. So we have to earn our stripes every single day by delivering audience, by delivering revenue, and I think that that’s where a lot of the product innovation comes from, that’s what really keeps us on our toes.
The last thing I’ll say about that is I don’t actually think that there is a bifurcation, certainly in the minds of consumers, between “traditional media creation” and “YouTube creators” increasingly. Some of our biggest partners and some of the biggest creators on YouTube are those traditional media companies, the Hollywood studios, the sports leagues, music has been one of our most important and largest verticals from day one and so I view all of that as the creative ecosystem and my goal is that they all have a place on YouTube to thrive.
There is an aspect, I think, when you do talk to creators where YouTube feels like a hamster wheel in terms of needing to create continually, and the other thing that I was just thinking about when I was watching the presentation today, and you were talking about connection and some of them was talking about some of the personal stories they’ve done on there, that really resonates when you get very personal and also getting very personal can be very draining and exhausting over time. Is that something you think about? Does that matter to you? Are you in a situation where there is this infinite wealth of content and you love creators, you support them, but they are in the end, a commodity?
NM: I think for me, that answer is very simple and I think for all of my colleagues — when you’re at YouTube, you hear that term “creator” in every single product review, every single decision we make, we’re in the business of building them up. And so yes, absolutely we think about their sustainability, their longevity on the platform. As you saw today, even as they started my remarks, it was important to me to call out some of those OG creators, many of whom, like Smosh, have been on there almost since day one and that’s really important.
I do think it sets the culture of what YouTube, and it’s what makes YouTube amazing. It’s amazing to me to see new — I was at this event last December and it was an event, and I saw over and over these new creators, many of them who are huge stars on our platform, go up to the generation of creators before them and said, “The only reason I have a channel is because I watched you when I was 11 years old or 14 years old”, or what have you.
So of course we care about that, it’s really, really important. I don’t believe that you have to be on this constant treadmill of creation to stay relevant for your audience or what have you.
A lot of creators certainly believe that.
NM: And part of my job, and my team’s job, is to show them that as long as you’re setting expectations appropriately with your audience, you can choose your timing and cadence. We have creators, enormous creators, tens of millions of subscribers who produce content once a month or even more rarely, and they have set that expectation with their audience and our algorithm is really just a reflection of that audience expectation, so that’s what I say about that. I also recognize that lots of opportunities stem from the audience that YouTubers create on YouTube so their additional opportunities, whether — including opportunities on other platforms or a book deal-
It’s because they’re taking their audience with them.
NM: I think what YouTubers tell me is that, “My home is YouTube, my real core audience is YouTube, but I love the fact that YouTube allows me in an unencumbered way to create all of these other opportunities for myself too”. And again, you saw that today, look at how many creators are leading into their own brands, launching new product lines, trying out other forms of media, and I think that’s awesome. We want to keep enabling that.
Are there any stories that I’m missing? Other than the fact that you still don’t disclose your costs, which drives me up the wall?
NM: [laughs] It’s 20 years, as I said, of YouTube, so it’s been a time of reflection for me and my team. One of the stories I didn’t mention was when I was at DoubleClick, I think my largest client was this video company above a pizza parlor in San Mateo, California called YouTube, so my history with YouTube actually predates both me and YouTube being part of Google. I just remember going, visiting Chad [Hurley] and Steve [Chen] and their teams and them saying like, “Neal, you’ve got to make sure these DoubleClick servers keep up because look at our growth”, and they showed me these crazy charts.
Back then, you knew that there was really special going on, these human beings were coming and sharing their stories, and these other human beings were watching these stories and you fast-forward 20 years later to today and you see all of this amazing product innovation and AI and what have you, but that core essence of YouTube about that human connection, hasn’t changed one bit. And that’s why I’m excited about the next 20 years too.
Neal Mohan, thank you for coming on Stratechery.
NM: Thank you for having me.
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