YouTube CEO bets on AI and bloggers

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan is confident that the key factors in the further development of the platform will be artificial intelligence technologies and strengthening interaction with the authors of popular channels, writes the Financial Times.

Neil Mohan. Image source: blog.youtube

YouTube’s annual revenue is $50 billion. The platform has evolved from hosting amateur videos into a major hub for streaming music and video, a cable TV subscription service, live sports broadcasts, and a revenue-sharing platform for bloggers with hundreds of millions of subscribers. According to Mohan, YouTube still has huge potential for growth. “We haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg of what we can do with technologies like generative AI,” he says.

Despite YouTube’s advertising revenue decline in 2023, it grew 15% to $25.4 billion in the first ten months of 2024. That’s only a fifth of Alphabet’s $144 billion in total search advertising revenue, but the company needs significant cash: in the face of competition with Microsoft and Amazon in the construction of data centers and the development of chips for AI, Alphabet’s expenses increased to $38.3 billion.

Mohan, named YouTube CEO in 2023 after five years as chief product officer, is committed to aggressively pursuing generative AI services. He must balance the power of instant music and video creation with AI against the concerns of bloggers who don’t want technology to supplant their creativity. The creator community is the cornerstone of YouTube’s success. Over the past three years, the platform has paid them $70 billion, received from advertising and paid subscriptions.

Google’s AI division, DeepMind, has already helped launch YouTube’s experimental Dream Screen and Dream Track features, which allow users to generate videos and music based on text queries. However, these tools are intended to help bloggers, not replace them, Mohan emphasized. Another promising development of DeepMind is automatic dubbing – translating videos from English into eight other languages ​​and back.

While YouTube is synonymous with video on laptops and phones, the platform is seeing its strongest growth in the smart TV segment. 1 billion hours of content are streamed here every day. These are not only TV series and sports, but also short vertical videos in the Shorts section, which competes with TikTok and reaches 70 billion views per day.

YouTube ranks third in terms of investment in original content, behind only Disney and Comcast. The platform invested $20 billion in content in the first half of 2024, surpassing Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery, according to Ampere Analysis. YouTube’s advertising revenue is projected to reach $35 billion by the end of 2024, which is higher than the total revenue of Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video and slightly lower than Netflix’s revenue. The platform’s largest investment was a seven-year agreement to broadcast matches of the US National Football League, costing $14 billion. Over the past year, 35 billion hours of sports content were watched on YouTube.