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Neal Mohan first encountered YouTube almost two decades ago in a tiny office above a pizzeria in San Mateo when he worked for DoubleClick, an advertising platform trying to help the founders of the streaming service make money.
Within two years, both Californian start-ups had been bought by Google, for $1.65bn and $3.1bn, respectively, bringing Mohan to the search giant to turbocharge its advertising business as it diversified into video.
YouTube, which Mohan now runs, today generates $50bn of annualised revenue for Alphabet, Google’s parent company. It has developed from hosting amateur clips to a hub for music streaming, cable TV subscriptions, live sports and a lucrative profit-sharing platform for “creators” — such as online influencers — and their hundreds of millions of Gen Z fans.
“I’m really bullish on the future of YouTube. We’re still in the first or second inning,” Mohan said in an interview at its San Bruno headquarters, 15 minutes north from where YouTube was founded. “We haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg in what we’ll be able to do with technologies like generative AI.”
YouTube is an increasingly vital business line as Google’s core search and advertising divisions face threats from antitrust lawsuits and as artificial intelligence rivals chip away at its dominance of mobile and desktop search.
After declining for much of 2023, YouTube’s advertising income has bounced back, growing 15 per cent to $25.7bn in the first nine months of 2024. While this is a fifth of the $144bn brought in by search-linked ads revenue, Alphabet needs the cash. It has ramped up spending to $38.3bn as it races Microsoft and Amazon to build data centres and develop chips to power its AI ambitions.
Mohan, 51, named chief executive in 2023 after five years as chief product officer, is launching a suite of AI-infused products to drive the next leg of YouTube’s growth. He faces a tricky balancing act between giving users new AI tools such as the ability to create near-instant video and music, without causing creators to revolt in fear of being supplanted.
Mohan is at pains to stress the importance of creators to its new strategy, having already paid out $70bn in subscription and advertising revenue to partners in the past three years.
He flagged two experimental features developed by DeepMind, Google’s AI unit, called Dream Screen and Dream Track, which “synthetically generate beautiful videos and music from text”.
“AI has to be in service of human creativity,” said Mohan. “They are tools in the hands of creators. They are never meant to replace them. That is the ethos.”
Another DeepMind feature Mohan highlighted is auto dubbing, which automatically translates English language videos into eight other languages and vice versa.
“Creators who have these massive audiences, what’s the barrier to their growth? Language,” he said. “That’s a problem that AI can solve, it will seamlessly exist within YouTube . . . That’s how our creators expect AI to be used on their behalf.”
