YouTube CEO Neal Mohan on AI, Censorship & the Future of Creators

[Music] the man himself, CEO of YouTube.

I didn't realize that when I took over the CEO gig, a big part of my job would be being a straight man. For a lot of YouTubers out there,

YouTube is now by far the biggest streamer in the world.

Shorts, I think, has just surpassed 70 billion views a day.

Mohan was one of the pioneers of internet advertising and keeping the world's largest creator economy afloat.

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.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome YouTube CEO Neil Mohan.

How are you? Good to see you, brother.

Thanks. Nice to see you, David. How are you? Nice to see you.

All right. Welcome, Neal. Neal and I could have done that together.

I mean, you could have.

What did you think? We talked to him a little bit about which platform is the most important. He said, “The one that pays us the most.” You don’t pay for content upfront. You’ve done some experiments. You do it all with the 55/45 revenue split. You sweep 45%. Seems like you’re doing pretty well. Are you taking too much money from creators?

Let’s get into it.

Can we get that down to 30%?

Well, first of all, thank you all for having me. It’s a privilege to be with you guys. Like they say, longtime listener, first-time caller, so it’s great to be here with all of you.

Do you listen to the podcast?

Yeah, I watch it.

Oh, you watch it? Where do you watch it? Where did you—Spotify?

On YouTube?

Oh, on YouTube. Yes, we’re there now. We are there now.

Can you please be prepared?

Yes. Yes.

I didn’t know we had a YouTube channel. Really? How’s it doing?

How many folks watch it on YouTube, just out of curiosity? There we go. All right. Okay. It’s about half.

Yeah, the channel is growing. You guys are close to 1 million subscribers. Watch time and views are all up and to the right, so congrats to all of you guys on that.

But on your question, Jason, we’ve paid out over $70 billion to the creator economy in the last 3 years. We are the original and world’s largest creator economy. That innovation, which is called the YouTube Partner Program, is well over a decade old now. The 55/45 split that you’re referring to means we pay out billions to creators, media-company partners, music partners, and so on.

I’m using the term “creator,” and I’ll use it for the next 30 minutes, in the broadest sense of the term. We’re a creator economy in the true entrepreneurial sense of the word. If you’re a creator on YouTube, in contrast to the traditional model, you’re betting on yourself, which is the opposite of the way that traditional media models have worked. As you grow, as your audience grows, and as your success grows, your monetization grows and your business grows as well.

Not every creator on our platform is going to become MrBeast or Dude Perfect, but there are north of 3 million creators in that Partner Program today earning revenue.

Back to my question: I feel like you’ve created all these stars. You look at the Tuckers, you look at the Megan's, and we’ll put ourselves maybe right behind them. We all choose to turn off monetization because the take rate is too high and we can do it better ourselves. Should you not start to think about 2 classes of folks? The up-and-comers who don’t have sales teams or distribution—maybe it’s more about building an audience—and then maybe looking at folks like us slightly differently. This seems to be a weakness in your game. Your take?

I just want to be clear that I love you. No, no, but it’s clear that people who are at this level take it on themselves because the 45% is just an absurdly high take rate for that level of person, the Tuckers, the Megan, they’d rather just bake their ads in. So, how do you think about that level of folks? They participate, but you don’t monetize them.

I would say that’s not the way I would characterize it. First of all, the way that I think about it is that all of these monetization models should be available to you, depending on what your business objectives are.

I’ve talked to a bunch of you guys about how you think about that monetization question and what’s important versus audience building. By the way, it’s the same type of conversation that happens with sports leagues or studios. My vision on all of this is that whatever model works for you as a creator, podcaster, or what have you should be the model that you adopt.

For example, take what Tucker’s doing and what Megan's doing. They’ve had enormous success on our platform, mostly driven by the fact that they’re incredibly talented at what they do, and the audience and the algorithm have figured that out. But it might be that the monetization model that works best is something where they’re representing their inventory themselves. That’s less about the take rate and more about the best way to package it up.

If you’re a creator getting started today, you’re not even concerned with that at all, because monetization is really only a byproduct of what you’ve been able to do from an audience-engagement standpoint.

The net is what matters, right, at the end of the day?

That’s my point. Take rates can be 55%, 20%, or 90%. If you’re making more money doing this than doing other things—

Because of the algorithm, maybe you can speak to the quality of the algorithm and the ad placement. You come from the ads business. You’re a DoubleClick guy.

Yeah. I think what I’d say on that is, really, it’s 2 things. One is that we invest very heavily in making it so that the advertising you see, whether you’re watching YouTube on a television screen, on your phone, or on your laptop, is relevant and targeted. The creative formats are there. We are a platform that caters to advertisers that are brand advertisers and brand builders, as well as direct-response advertisers. That is a big area of investment.

The reason why advertisers are so excited about the ROI—and I spend a lot of time talking to advertisers—is that the engagement is differentiated, and that turns into ROI for advertisers. What I mean by that is, if you go to YouTube, you are really leaned into what you’re watching. You are a MrBeast superfan. You are a Michelle Kari superfan. You are a superfan of your favorite creator.

That is a different type of engagement that actually translates into different ROI, regardless of where your objectives are in the marketing funnel. That’s our secret sauce. That’s where this $70 billion that we pay out to the creator economy, and all these hundreds of thousands of jobs that we create in the creator ecosystem on a daily basis, come from.

Let me uplevel this into a more general question. 10 or 15 years ago, the cable channels and the way that we consumed content were largely live. We would tune in for shows, and one of the byproducts of that was national culture. There would be these things that would enter the zeitgeist, and we’d all talk about them. We would be unified by them.

The upside of all of this infinite distribution is that you get to watch what you want. The downside is that there’s really no connective thread—almost nothing that we all talk about that’s the same. How does YouTube view that problem? Is it a problem? Is there a responsibility, or are there things that you can do to make things that are a little bit less on-demand, a little bit more appointment viewing, that build identity and culture?

Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting question. One of the consequences of what you’re talking about vis-à-vis the algorithm is that if you guys open up your phones right now, your YouTube feed is going to look like you. It really is about what you’re genuinely interested in and watching. That can lead to the type of fragmentation that you’re describing.

Having said that, if you ask someone in Gen Z or a millennial what the top 4 or 5 really big breakout pop-culture trends were, a lot of them are actually an aggregation of these types of things. They could be trends that might not be the most relevant to all of us or to this audience, but they are relevant to a particular age group.

We do see a lot of those national—and in many cases, because YouTube is a global platform, global—moments. Two billion people come to it every single day. There’s enough aggregation, even among these niche areas, where you do see some of that.

The other thing that I will say about how I think about it is that I do think live events and those water-cooler-type moments are really important. You saw the biggest one of those happen on YouTube just 2 days ago.

That Brazil game that Ari was mentioning was on YouTube. Yeah.

And the reason why it was such a success, I would argue, is because of the aperture that YouTube can provide from a reach standpoint. But the other reason—and to the NFL’s credit—you guys saw how relevant we were trying to make it for this YouTube generation. Again, you obviously saw the integration with things like Dude Perfect and MrBeast in the actual livestream of the game itself, but that sort of creator engagement through the lens of creators is something that sports leagues are leaning into. It’s what I describe as a new water-cooler moment.

What percentage of watched-media minutes do you guys have? Do you think, if you look at all media—broadcast, movies—?

You guys know we’re the number-one streaming platform here in the U.S., and we’ve been the number-one streamer in the U.S. here for 2 years. I think Nielsen’s latest number was roughly 13% to 14% of the TV-watching audience. But remember, that number doesn’t include YouTube on mobile, so it’s a television number.

But to Ari’s point, do you see that growing? Are people spending more time consuming media because it’s more personalized and engaging, and they’re finding perhaps more free time?

I do. Look, our numbers are growing. I think other streaming platforms are growing, and other mobile platforms are growing. If you look at the totality of human time, it’s still a relatively small portion of that.

Let me shift gears to a different topic for a second. I think during COVID, there was a real sense that the censorship was out of control on social media—not just YouTube, but Twitter, Facebook, all of them. If you questioned the efficacy of vaccines or social distancing, or even topics like the trans agenda or climate change, there was a risk that you could be censored, shadowbanned, or demonetized. It feels like the industry has pulled back from that and things have opened up again. A lot of that is, I think, due to what Elon did in terms of buying Twitter and opening things back up. I guess my question is: Has the industry actually learned from that, or is censorship just on pause during the Trump years?

There’s another facet to get into, right? I like it. That’s why.

Good question.

It’s a great question. I think I’ll just say a couple of things about that, and one of them will sound like it’s actually connecting the dots between the questions that you guys asked. The way I answered David’s question is, first of all, I think a lot of these platforms are actually pretty different. What Twitter does is different from what some of the Meta platforms do, which, of course, is very different from what YouTube does. You could argue, as witnessed from the rest of this conversation, that we probably have a lot more similarity with a streaming platform than we do with a social media platform.

That’s one point, but I think it’s important context for what I’m about to say. The reason I say that is because 99% of what happens on YouTube is all the creators that I talked about, all the podcasters, the Taylor Swifts of the world, and all the music. Obviously, music is our largest and most important vertical. For example, we’re a music platform, so that is where a lot of the watch time on YouTube is, versus a discourse that might be happening in a social feed somewhere.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t have comments on our videos and all that sort of thing, which is where some of this discourse that you’re alluding to, David, might have happened. I do think, at the highest level, there is something about the fact that that was a very different time. I remember March and April of 2020, when it was, “Oh, my God, do you get this this way, or is it this way? Mask or this?”

I literally woke up one day, and there were people climbing 5G cell towers and falling from cell towers because it was like you could literally get the thing from cell towers. It sounds crazy today, but that was the nature of the types of things that were popping up.

So, some lessons learned or regrets there?

Let me just finish. That’s the context in which we were having to make some of these decisions. Fast-forward to today: Obviously, we’re in a completely different world, just in terms of the nature of the disease and all that sort of thing. All of those policies that existed back then are nonexistent today. That’s my way of answering your question: Is it a temporal thing or not?

I would argue that a lot of these sorts of things are contextual. By the way, YouTube in particular was criticized to an extreme amount because of all the content that we left up on the platform around the Wuhan virus controversy and all sorts of other things that we were leaving up while other places were acting differently on them. So we got beat up a lot from one side of the spectrum then.

Our approach really just has to be flexible to the environment and the context. I think we’re always going to get criticized for being an open platform. There’s a lot of magic that happens because of the open platform. All these amazing creators wouldn’t exist if we didn’t have an open platform and didn’t stand for free speech.

Hold on, I want to follow up on this, if I may. There are 2 categories that I have in my feed because of the algorithm: firearms and poker. Both of those groups of creators are a little bit up in arms—no pun intended—because they are being demonetized. How do you make a decision on who’s allowed to earn and who’s not allowed to earn and be part of the ad network? Poker folks and people who do firearm safety, firearm training, and best practices are demonetized, and they’re complaining about it now. How do you make those kinds of decisions? A lot of them are incredibly successful creators on our platform, Jason.

But not monetized.

No, some of them are monetized as well. We do have a clear set of rules, and we’ve had these for a long time, in terms of sales of firearms and those types of things. Obviously, there are legal frameworks and all those types of things around it. But in terms of the firearms community and learning about firearms and safety, which obviously is an important thing, especially for young people, we’re one of the largest places where those audiences exist, as well as monetization of that type of content.

Now, the balance—and obviously, some of this comes from experts that we’ve worked with in that vertical itself—is that something might be appropriate for an adult user of that type of content but may not be appropriate for a child. There’s a lot of nuance behind it.

With poker, there’s probably something around sports-gambling legality and all that sort of stuff, but generally speaking, as you guys know—

There’s an enormous amount of poker content that’s incredibly successful on our platform. That goes back to what Chimath was saying: Whatever niche there is out there, however big or however small, you’re going to find a set of creators who are just as passionate about it as you are.

I think the interesting question is: How do you organize yourself across all the different countries you’re in and the scale that you’re at to deal with the cultural nuances of every different country, then to deal with the laws of every different country, and then to deal, as David said, sometimes with the vicissitudes of social policy in every country? How do you deal with that organizationally? What does that actually look like?

It’s the part that turns my hair white. But look, I think part of it—I say this to my team all the time—is that it is a challenge. But I think it’s a challenge that, honestly, I view as a bit of a privilege, in the sense that it wouldn’t be important if we weren’t such an important place, especially for young people, to connect, get information, entertain themselves, and learn. We’re the largest learning platform in the world. We know that, obviously, just given all the use cases and the watch time, et cetera.

At least from my standpoint, I try to be as global as we possibly can in terms of principles. One of the things that I always say about YouTube is that our North Star principle has always been, “Give everyone a voice and show them the world.” That’s our mission statement. It stands for freedom of expression and freedom of speech. We are an American company, and that notion—that value of freedom of speech—is core to our ethos. We really do try to start with that as a global position.

Having said that, you’re right: There is an enormous patchwork of legislation and regulation that exists in every country.

Are there people who are writing policies, and then some folks just have to understand them and manually try to react to, “Here’s how we deal with this issue in India. Here’s how we deal with this issue in Brazil. Here’s how we deal with it in France”? Or is it algorithmic, or is it a combination?

It’s always some combination, because the scale of YouTube is enormous: Hundreds of hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every single minute of every single day.

We want to be as core to that north star as possible. Frankly, there are situations where we have to push back on that core—push back on what might be an encroachment on that principle. Having said that, we also, of course, have to legally operate in all of these countries, just like any other platform.

There are 3 products, Neal, that I'm super obsessed with, and I would love to get your take on them in terms of priorities for you. YouTube TV—unbelievable.

Unbelievable. YouTube Red.

That is a great product. YouTube Red, which I think is YouTube Premium taking the ads off—unbelievable.

And then I think a sleeper is that you've kind of built in Patreon-like functionality, subscriptions. Maybe you can walk us through the footprint of each of those and the prioritization of those, because they do seem to have had a significant impact on engagement and how people look at the platform.

Yeah, no, I'm super proud of all 3 of those products. As a product guy myself, that's the fun part of the job: actually building all of these amazing products. Their origin story on YouTube TV—I’m a sports nut. Actually, a lot of the people on my team who've been involved with YouTube TV since the very early days are also big sports guys. I'm also a news junkie, and that's the core use case of YouTube TV in many ways.

If you think about the features that we built—Multiview, Key Plays, even some of the fantasy integrations that you see—that's the lens through which you should think about how we're going to continue to develop that product. The question I would always get was, “Why are you guys doing this? Look at what's happening to that part of the paid ecosystem. Why are you diving into this shrinking thing?” Our thought was that a lot of it has to do with reinventing that whole experience from the standpoint of a fan or a consumer.

That's the YouTube TV origin and where it's going. The one thing that you should pay attention to is something that we call Primetime Channels in YouTube. They're a lot of those same linear channels, or traditional media channels, but you can buy them à la carte in the main YouTube app.

And so there's connectivity between those 2 products. I was wondering when that would happen, because for me it's just CNBC. I want to have it inside of YouTube, but I have to load it. Then, when I travel, it's always like, “Oh, what region are you in?” Premium—how many Premium subscribers are there now? How is that growing? How does that affect the ad business? For me, the ads are death. I need my time back, so how do you think about that?

Yeah. I do think that, for our business, advertising is going to remain—as it is today—the predominant way through which we monetize on behalf of creators. That $70 billion number that I mentioned, most of it comes from ads, and the reason is that, at a fundamental level, we are a platform of scale: 2 billion people come to it every single day.

Having said that, giving consumers choice—an uninterrupted experience—is important. There are about 125 million subscribers.

25 million pay for YouTube Premium. Amazing. How does that money get split with the creators? If I'm watching MrBeast without ads, how do—

There's a rough engagement- and watch-time-type calculation.

Is TV basically the biggest cable-subscriber-base equivalent? Where do you guys rank in cable subscribers?

Actually, it's interesting. The way that you're talking about it is like, well, that's your uninterrupted TV subscription tier, which is how I think lots of people think about it. The origin of YouTube Premium was actually a music premium subscription service. It was like called YouTube Music and Premium.

A lot of those 125 million subscribers are not just people watching it the way that they would watch Netflix or Amazon without ads. There's a lot of that, but a lot of it is music fans, too—people for whom their music service isn't actually Spotify; it's YouTube. That's where they discover music and listen to and watch their favorite videos. How do you have an uninterrupted music service?

When you have all these incredible AI models all over the place, people will be generating all kinds of content. Some of that content could be news content or topical content. It could talk about a vaccine; it could talk about whatever. Do you feel you have a responsibility to figure out whether that's real or not? Do you think that's the role of the actual creators? Do you think the CDC should have a YouTube channel where they watermark the stuff that they put out? Whose responsibility is this going to be?

Yeah, I think—

And how much of it is our responsibility as a consumer?

I mean, look, I think that here's how I think about it. First, with the growth of these AI-enablement tools, you're going to see that the distinction between whether it was completely AI-generated or AI-assisted, et cetera, is going to be a continuum. That's the first piece. We're already seeing that. We see that on YouTube, obviously.

You open up the YouTube app, hit that plus button, and you can type in a text prompt. It will generate a video for you using our VO models. That's already happening.

One of the things that we do is add a label that says “#AI-generated.” We put that sort of front of the box—we'll literally put that on the video. In some cases, it's usually in the metadata. That's obviously not foolproof.

But I think, at least from a principle standpoint, the way I think about it is that YouTube has community guidelines. We try to be transparent about them, and we publish them on our website. An a priori distinction between “it was AI-generated, therefore it must be violative” and everything else is not the way to do it. It's really just about giving users as much transparency as possible.

The other thing that's really important in the creator business—in the creativity business—whether you're a Hollywood celebrity, a YouTuber, or an artist, is that the thing I hear over and over that they really care about is their likeness. If you're Taylor Swift, it's your voice. If you're Marquez Brownley, it's your face—your likeness.

No, I mean, there are people doing live chimoth things to give Bitcoin away, and I send it to Neal and report it sometimes. I'll tell you, the AI slop issue is getting bad.

Send it to me directly instead of tagging me. The issue really is that I'm a Corvette fan, and the incentive is so perverse. I've had to ban a bunch of these channels that show me thumbnails of “This is the new Corvette,” or “This is the new prototype.” It's AI slop, and it's obvious what they're doing: they're trying to insert themselves into the algorithm, and then I just ban them.

We do give you control, but I do think labeling them is important. I don't want to put the burden on you to do that. I think the labeling is one piece, but the other thing is that we have a track record with Content ID, which is basically the rights-management system that you could argue created that whole creator economy in the first place. YouTube's success—it saved YouTube. So Content ID is—think about that metaphor as it applies to AI.

Wonderful.

So we are working on this notion of what I call likeness detection. If it's a Chamath face, the algorithm should be good enough to actually detect that and then give you a choice as to whether that should come down.

Right.

Does that come down? Or there might be some creators that choose to monetize it and give—

So, giving creators—

We can take ownership of it.

You can take ownership of it. So people take our clips and make versions of us as dogs, or—

For us, it's not just words. We actually have a track record of doing that because of something like Content ID.