Neal Mohan first encountered YouTube nearly 20 years ago in a tiny office above a San Mateo pizzeria when he worked for DoubleClick, an promoting platform that sought to assist the streaming service's founders earn cash.
Within two years, each California startups were acquired by Google for $1.65 billion and $3.1 billion, respectively, bringing Mohan to the search giant to spice up its promoting business by diversifying into video.
YouTube now generates $50 billion in annual revenue for Alphabet, Google's parent company. It has evolved from hosting amateur clips to a hub for music streaming, cable TV subscriptions, live sports and a lucrative profit-sharing platform for so-called “creators” – similar to online influencers – and their a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of Gen Z fans.
“I'm really optimistic in regards to the way forward for YouTube. We’re still in the primary or second inning,” Mohan said in an interview at his headquarters in San Bruno, quarter-hour north of where YouTube was founded. “We haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg of what we will achieve with technologies like generative AI.”
YouTube is an increasingly essential business as Google's core search and promoting divisions are threatened by antitrust lawsuits and rivals in artificial intelligence erode the corporate's dominance in mobile and desktop search.
After declining for much of 2023, YouTube's promoting revenue has rebounded, rising 15 percent to $25.7 billion in the primary nine months of 2024. While that's a fifth of the $144 billion generated by search promoting revenue, Alphabet needs the money. The company has ramped up spending to $38.3 billion and is competing with Microsoft and Amazon to construct data centers and develop chips to fuel its AI ambitions.
Mohan, 51, who was named CEO in 2023 after five years as chief product officer, is launching a spread of AI-powered products to fuel YouTube's next stage of growth. He faces a difficult balancing act: He must provide users with recent AI tools, similar to the creation of near-instant videos and music, without developers rebelling for fear of being pushed out.
Mohan is keen to spotlight the importance of creators to his recent strategy, having already paid out $70 billion in subscription and ad revenue to partners over the past three years.
He pointed to 2 experimental features called Dream Screen and Dream Track, developed by DeepMind, Google's AI unit, that “synthetically create beautiful videos and music from text.”
“AI must serve human creativity,” Mohan said. “They are tools within the hands of creators. You should never replace them. That’s the ethos.”
Another DeepMind feature Mohan highlighted is auto-sync, which routinely translates English-language videos into eight other languages and vice versa.
“What is the obstacle for YouTubers who’ve such a big audience? Language,” he said. “This is an issue that AI can solve, it would exist seamlessly in YouTube.” . . In this fashion, our developers expect AI for use on their behalf.”
The Trump Conundrum
Another problem Mohan has to take care of is the wrath of President-elect Donald Trump. He was banned from the platform for 2 years in 2021 after Google believed he incited violence throughout the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
Trump and his newfound allies in Silicon Valley accuse social networks of left-wing censorship and favor the free-speech absolutism espoused by Elon Musk on X.
Marc Andreessen, the billionaire enterprise capitalist who helps Musk advise Trump, has called for the discharge of internal Google data in an identical method to the so-called “Twitter files” that allegedly reveal anti-conservative bias carefully decisions.
“We should get the YouTube files, and we probably will,” Andreessen said on one Podcast with Joe Rogan. “This recent government will expose all of these items.”
Mohan said: “We have already worked very productively with Trump for 4 years through many difficult times.” . in a way that preserved freedom of expression and broad opinions. We truly remain a bastion of free expression. . . But simply because it’s an open platform doesn’t mean every little thing is feasible.”
Mohan said he has made “very, very large” investments in AI and human moderation and strengthened community guidelines since there was a “melting moment” in 2017 when advertisers boycotted YouTube after a series of actions Scandals about uploading hate speech videos and concerns about pedophiles and terrorists infiltrate Comment sections.
While YouTube is primarily related to videos on laptops and mobile devices, connected TVs are the fastest growing segment, streaming 1 billion hours of content on daily basis. Not only is it a preferred medium for watching sports and series, but additionally “shorts” created by YouTubers, rivaling TikTok, which, based on the corporate, receives 70 billion views per day.
According to Ampere Analysis, YouTube is the third-largest spender of original content behind Disney and Comcast, investing greater than $20 billion in the primary half of 2024, surpassing Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery.
“YouTube’s promoting revenue alone, expected to be $35 billion in 2024, exceeds the whole revenue of Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video and is just shy of Netflix’s total revenue,” an Ampere report said.
His biggest bet so far was a seven-year, $14 billion deal to broadcast US National Football League games, which is one reason 35 billion hours of sports content were watched on YouTube last yr.
Mohan is open to buying more rights deals, however the high costs mean each have to be “evaluated by itself merits.”
CEO ambitions?
Mohan was born in Indiana, Michigan and moved to Lucknow, India, for top school before returning to the United States to review electrical engineering at Stanford University.
After joining Google in 2007 as a part of the DoubleClick deal, he became a protégé of top executive Susan Wojcicki and helped construct the ad tech business that brings advertisers and publishers together in easy, algorithmically driven online auctions. It was so successful that the Justice Department is attempting to break it up as a monopoly.
He succeeded Wojcicki at YouTube in 2023. She died of lung cancer in August.
Mohan has received many offers from rivals during his 17-year tenure. It was dubbed Google’s “100 Million Dollar Man” after reportedly receiving a retention package of stock awards when he was courted by Twitter in 2013.
“Don’t consider every little thing you read on the market,” Mohan said of his salary. When asked if he ultimately wanted the highest job at Alphabet, the YouTube boss dodged the query.
“I've been at Google for a very long time. I actually benefit from the people I work with,” he said. “We are still at the start of where AI will take us – if we had this conversation two years ago, 80 percent of what we were talking about would just be a theoretical idea.” . It keeps things really, really exciting.”
