YouTube is coming up with innovations that could make creators of us all with the magic of artificial intelligence. YouTube’s Indian American CEO, Neal Mohan, spoke about the transformations underway in an interview with the Financial Times.
Mohan, 51, born in Indiana, went to high school in Lucknow, India, and studied electrical engineering at Stanford University, has watched the company grow.
He first saw YouTube nearly two decades ago in a modest office above a pizza parlour in Silicon Valley. Back then, as an executive at DoubleClick, an advertising platform, he sought to help YouTube’s founders transform their fledgling video-sharing platform into a money-making venture.
The founders soon sold out.
Founded in 2005, YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006. The search giant snapped up DoubleClick for $3.1 billion soon after – and Mohan hasn’t looked back since then.
Joining Google, he became a protégé of top executive Susan Wojcicki and helped build Google’s ad tech business, which matches advertisers and publishers. A top executive, he succeeded Wojcicki as YouTube CEO in 2023.
$50 billion business
He deals in billions. Today, YouTube generates a staggering $50 billion in annual revenue for Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reports the Financial Times.
The start-up he remembers has become a media empire offering everything from music streaming and live sports to cable TV subscriptions and a profit-sharing ecosystem for creators catering to millions of Gen Z fans.
“I’m really bullish on the future of YouTube. We’re still in the first or second inning,” Mohan told the Financial Times in an interview at the video giant’s San Bruno headquarters.
“We haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg in what we’ll be able to do with technologies like generative AI,” he added.
YouTube’s role within Alphabet is increasingly critical as Google faces antitrust lawsuits and AI rivals snap for a share of its search business. After a rocky 2023, YouTube’s ad revenue rebounded, surging 15 per cent to $25.7 billion in the first nine months of 2024.
While this figure is dwarfed by the $144 billion generated by Google’s search-linked ads, YouTube is a valuable secondary source of revenue for Alphabet, pouring billions into data centres and chip development to be an AI powerhouse.
AI innovations
Since taking the helm in 2023, Mohan has doubled down on AI innovations to fuel YouTube’s next growth phase.
These include the AI-driven tools Dream Screen and Dream Track. Developed by Google’s DeepMind AI unit, these “synthetically generate beautiful videos and music from text,” he told the Financial Times.
But with innovation comes risk: Mohan must reassure creators — to whom YouTube has paid out $70 billion in subscription and ad revenue over the past three years — that AI is an ally, not a replacement.
“AI has to be in service of human creativity,” he emphasised. “These are tools in the hands of creators. They are never meant to replace them,” he added.
The creators also stand to benefit from another DeepMind innovation: auto-dubbing, which translates English-language videos into eight other languages and vice versa. AI, he said, can help creators reach audiences who do not speak the same language.
Politics and human moderation
Besides business and technology, Mohan has to deal with politicians, too. Following the Jan 6 Capitol riot, YouTube banned Donald Trump for two years, a decision that angered the president-elect and his allies.
Mohan told the Financial Times: “We’ve already worked with Trump for four years in a very productive way through a lot of challenging times… We really do remain a bastion of free speech… But, just because it’s an open platform, it doesn’t mean that anything goes.”
Mohan added that he has led a “very heavy” investment in AI and human moderation.
YouTube has evolved in recent years. Its fastest-growing segment is connected TVs, with over a billion hours of content streamed daily. Its “Shorts” platform, a rival to TikTok, now garners 70 billion daily views.
Additionally, YouTube has become a dominant player in sports, investing $14 billion in a seven-year deal to broadcast NFL games, contributing to the 35 billion hours of sports watched on the platform in 2023.
“YouTube’s ad revenue alone, forecasted at $35 billion for 2024, exceeds Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video’s total earnings,” according to an Ampere report.
Mohan has reaped rich rewards in his meteoric career. He was dubbed Google’s “$100 million man” after reportedly receiving an eyewatering retention package in 2013 when Twitter tried to lure him away.
Asked if he aspired to the top job at Alphabet, he dodged the question.
“I do really enjoy the people that I work with,” he told the Financial Times. “We’re still in the early days of where AI will take us… it keeps things really, really exciting.”