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Welcome to Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I am the chief correspondent at Business Insider covering tech and media. And today we've got a conversation about tech and media. It is a conversation with the CEO of YouTube. Neal Mohan, we recorded this yesterday, that's Tuesday, you're hearing us on Wednesday or later. So you'll hear us talking about some sort of time travel here or talking about an event that hasn't happened. But now it has. Anyway, you'll figure it out.
This is a good conversation about stuff that I care deeply about. I think you will too. Now here's me and Neil Mohan. I'm here with Neil Mohan. He is the CEO of YouTube. Welcome Neil. Thank you. They're nice to be with you. Instead of welcome. Thanks for having me. I'm here in one of the many, many giant spaces you guys own in New York City. Yeah, welcome.
Where you are in the venue where we're going to be having our meet on YouTube. Right. So we're recording the cent Tuesday on Wednesday. You guys have a big event. It's aimed at creators. You will have announced a bunch of AI tools that are going to help help creators make better stuff. Right. Why is it important for one YouTube to have a bunch of tools for creators and two wise and important of their AI?
Well, the first is really just what YouTube is all about, which is, you know, you walk the halls of YouTube. You're going to hear the word creators, you know, a hundred times a day. We should just call them YouTubers. We call them YouTubers. They call themselves YouTubers. We're very proud of what they do. And the analogy I like to use that will sort of give you an insight into how I think about your question is at YouTube, our job is to build the stage.
But the people on this, I like it because it really does consistently hold true. But they're the ones who are on the stage. And so every tool, every feature, all of these new products that we're excited about rolling out tomorrow are really to allow creators to do what they do best. And the AI part of it, in my view, is really just an enabler.
It really is analogous to technology innovation in general. So like, for example, you know, dream screen, which will be one of the products we announced, is really about providing a toolkit to creators to help them do what they do best or help them do what they do faster or come up with a creative idea and turn it into reality. And so really more along the lines of a tool. And so that's why the AI piece is important. Is it allows for a whole new class of creator tools?
As a YouTube viewer, will I know that this thing was made with AI? Should I care that this thing was made with AI? We do have a policy that says that if you've uploaded a piece of content video to YouTube, and it's been manipulated, call it AI, call it just some form of technical manipulation, in a realistic way where a normal user, viewer, you or I couldn't tell the difference, then it should be labeled.
And that's been about out for now for a few months. Creators are expected to do it. We have the label kind of writing them, writing the metadata. But that's for those use cases where you really are trying to replicate some reality that hadn't happened. But remember, Peter, people use technological tools in their videos, in their audio all the time. And so where does that stop and where does AI pick up? That's a pretty blurry line.
And so on the whole, I think we as viewers are going to be a bit indifferent to that and really going to focus more on who the creator is. It's Peter's podcast. That's what people want to hear. It's XYZ's YouTube video. Right. And they shouldn't know or shouldn't care whether we used an AI tool to do some of the editing. If it's about the creator that they're looking to connect with us.
So we've been talking broadly in pop culture about AI for the last couple of years. There's the sort of two camps, right? And often people are in both camps at the same time. And one is these new tools, this new technology is going to allow people to do better stuff, cooler stuff, faster stuff, cheaper stuff. And the other is this is going to just create a bunch of terrible outcomes. Lots of unintended consequences.
People in the creative community are constantly worried about AI taking their jobs. I think about a lot about just for you guys what it's like to have people who can now create any kind of media. And it's like a zero-cost sort of infinite amount of media. I think about what it means for you guys to deal with people uploading an infinite amount of content onto your site that you've got to evaluate, sort, talk some of the stuff out, figure out how to promote some of it to me.
I've been asking you about it for a couple of years. You've seen to be at least outwardly confident slash plaza about this. But why are you not concerned about just an ocean of mediocre or worse stuff swapping YouTube? I would say that there's a couple of things that at least in my experience hold true. Anytime there are these sorts of big technological innovations. The first is that there is no doubt that these technologies bring disruption.
And I don't want to underplay that in any way. They're going to be disruptive to the creative process in many ways that I think will ultimately be beneficial. But they will be disruptive to that process. They will impact certainly people that are in the creative industry in many ways. There are many aspects of that creative process creation journey that will be impacted.
So I do acknowledge that. I think that that's going to be something that we will see. I think it's frankly early days to see how all of that's playing out. Even though you're right, we've been talking about this for the last two years. But there's another thing that I also think is really true in these sorts of big paradigm shifts. And that's, we all as viewers, consumers of the content, people who watch the content, listen to it.
Are most interested in other human stories. And I don't believe that AI is going to change that. And that's why I believe that everything that we talk about with respect to AI is in the construct of it being a tool as opposed to a replacement. And so because at the end of the day, there's going to be a creator or creative person that's in the loop that's actually creating the stories, the fandom, all of those things that viewers come to YouTube and other platforms on a regular basis for.
What about like the middle ground? I just imagined someone in a basement in Ohio or a content farm in Vietnam just saying instead uploading one of these videos to YouTube, I'm going to do a thousand iterations of them playing room with fonts and different edits. And so even if I'm not trying to be deceitful or disruptive, I'm not making objectionable content, I'm just going to put out an infinite amount of iterations of this.
And we'll see which one does better. Isn't that a cost for you? Isn't that a burden for you guys to deal with that? It will be our burden to deal with as a platform, but it shouldn't be the users burden or the viewers burden. And what should rise to the top, just like it does today on YouTube, is quality content. Content that people are interested in consuming and watching and sharing with their friends. And I expect that to be true. It has been true since the beginning of YouTube.
And I expect that to be true, even in this AI world that we're going to have seen an uptick and in velocity and in the number of videos being uploaded. Can you see that people are using the scenario that I spelled out is actually happening, or people are producing just lots and lots of more stuff? You're obviously very familiar with YouTube for a long time. First of all, lots of content is uploaded to YouTube every single minute of every single day.
And lots of people have tried to upload content that would aim to abuse the system, those types of things. We have robust safeguards against that that continue to get better every single week, every single month. And I haven't seen a material change in a way that sort of impacts the platform. You don't see a bump in. We are uploads per minute, just took a spike. I don't know. It's like you said, I've been covering this a long time. I had to double check. YouTube will be 20 years old next year.
Time flies. I still think it's dramatically undercovered in the business media and pop culture. It's kind of wild. One thing I think about a lot is the fact that you guys are the only major non-pornographic platform to hand out a significant chunk of revenue to people who make the videos. It's 55% for sort of a regular video. We can talk about other stuff. Why do you think none of your competitors at Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat have instituted a system like the one you guys have?
Where if you guys make a dollar and an advertising revenue of 55 cents of a coach to the person who made the video? It's a good question. Why do you think that's the case? It's expensive. You're not an audience media, but you're not an audience. I guess what I would say is we are really proud of the fact that we're not just the original, but the largest creator economy. As I said at the beginning of this conversation, you walk the halls of YouTube.
You're going to hear that term creator like 100 times. And creators, really, when they speak with me, they're fundamentally focused on two things. The first and foremost, of course, is helping them find and build an audience. Without that, sort of nothing else matters. And that's the first thing. But the second thing is lots of creative people on an early living. They want to build a business on YouTube. And so those are the two fundamental conversations we have.
And the last three years, as you know, we've paid out $70 billion to the creator economy. That is something at YouTube that we are enormously proud of. But to be devil's advocate, semi-devil's advocate, don't you look at the folks at Instagram, the folks at TikTok and go, well, they're building huge businesses. And creators seem to be making stuff for them. They're not getting anything out of it, or they're getting very little compared to what we pay. I wish we could pay less.
Do you have that conversation? I mean, look, our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. That's core to what we do. And you can't do that in any meaningful way when I talk to creators without also giving them the means to build a livelihood on the platform. But you can, that's a fairer. Instead of 55%, it could be 25%. It would still be better than any other deal you get anywhere else. You're still providing all those tools.
We're still going to use you because you're still cutting bigger checks than anybody else. Why not do that? I'm a firm believer, and I've seen this at my time at YouTube, that the real path to success here is to grow the overall pie. That's what we're very focused on.
And so all of our efforts, we talked about creator tools, but even our efforts in terms of, and I spend a lot of my time talking to advertisers and brands also, a lot of our efforts there are really to actually grow the overall pie. You mentioned something earlier in terms of how sometimes people don't think about YouTube. I would argue that for many people in the world in this country, when they turn on television, they're turning on YouTube.
And so a lot of my focus is to actually have brands and advertisers really realize that and grow the overall pie as opposed to thinking about whether the share should be X or Y. Okay. But I mean, they are advertising on your rival platforms too, which don't have the, don't need to have the system. It doesn't seem like you have to have the system you've created to make a big platform that people want to watch, that advertisers want to spend time on, that people make stuff for.
And then you guys, you rolled out shorts a couple of years ago. It's your TikTok clone. You won't call it a TikTok clone. That has a different payout. It's 45%, instead of 55%, why is that a lower percentage? Well, the mechanics of shorts, monetization work a little bit differently, as you know. The kind of the modality is consumption in a feed that you're scrolling through.
So those dollars are pooled as opposed to the way that they work in traditional YouTube long form with the ads being associated with the videos. So just even the concept of revshare, just there at a base level is a bit different. There are other things also that go into producing and having shorts content created that are just different in terms of the cost structure. A lot of shorts is about creation itself within the platform.
So there's a lot of resources that we invest in to make it so that those creation tools are effective, that all those filters and effects work that the way that they do so that they get distributed in the feed. And so it's just a different set of services that we offer to creators versus long form, which as you know, traditionally has grown up through people just uploading that to YouTube. Your costs are greater. You're going to say, look, it's going to come out of the...
We're going to have to give you a little less. There's just a lot of tools and services that we provide in that context, the mobile creation context, that traditional sort of long form YouTube videos didn't have as that side of the business. If I was going to be a real jerk about this, I'd say, well, you're introducing new tools all the time. You could say, well, look, we introduced this many more tools. These things didn't exist in 2005. Thus your share should be less. But I'm going to drop it.
You've negotiated for a lower and a higher share at the same time. We'll see if I start posting my stuff on YouTube and then I'll come back to you. We'll be right back with Neil Mohan after a word from a sponsor. Think scaling AI is hard? Think again. With WatsonX, you can deploy AI across any environment. Above the clouds, helping pilots navigate flights, and on lots of clouds, helping employees automate tasks.
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How many folks are in the partnership program where you do get a split one way or the other? The YouTube Partner Program? About 3 million, little over 3 million. So you guys introduced that, I think, like 2007, 2008. Yeah, it's been quite some time. And then it shot up over time. And then around 2018, you guys made it dramatically harder to be in the program. You cut a lot of people out, people called it the Apocalypse. And has it grown since then?
Yeah. Can you walk me through how you were around for most of this? You grew around. I was a little bit grue, and you said we got to put the brakes on this. We're going to make it much harder to monetize on YouTube. You're going to have a much higher bar to clear before you could participate in this revenue share. Why did you make that move? You're talking back now to when we reduced the size of the program. Yeah. No, I remember it vividly.
I was obviously those were difficult decisions for us to make. And at the end of the day, it was really about the core of what I was describing as the creator economy. And a big part of it was, if you think about what YouTube is, it really is sort of like this three-legged stool. It, of course, starts with creators. That's what attracts all of the viewers that come to the platform on a regular basis. All of us, that fundamentally is what attracts advertisers and brands to participate.
And so when any of those sort of legs of the stools are damaged or there are sort of questions around it, it impacts all the other pieces. And so as you recall, back then, there were lots of questions about brand safety, brand quality. And so that was the priority of mine, priority of all of our teams. And so we really focused very hard on it.
And part of it was making sure that these creators, these channels, that the advertisers were running on, were going to hit a certain threshold in terms of brand safety, brand suitability. And all that went into the decisions to have a different set of criteria by which you were eligible. Now, we put that into place, as you said several years ago. And that did reduce the number of YPP channels.
But since then, YPP channels have grown a lot, particularly because of shorts, actually, 80% of creators that come through the shorts monetization doorway for YPP actually take advantage of other monetization capabilities that exist on YouTube. So that's a pretty remarkable number if you think about it. And by the way, that doesn't just include long form ads monetization. That includes eligibility for all of our other monetization products as well.
And so since that moment, the number of creators in YPP has grown by over a million, I think. But when you went from the initial group of creators who were able to share revenue to this much larger group and then shrink it, what happened to YouTube's overall revenue, what happened to revenue for the creators? You know, I can't speak to the specifics of what happened to revenue as a result of that back then.
You know, a lot of it has to do with supply demand dynamics, you know, it's not directly proportional to the number of channels, as you know. And so I can't speak to that specifically. But what I can say is that the YPP program has grown quite substantially, as I said, by over a million channels in that time period. When you guys reduced the number of channels, like you said, there was this overall conversations of wrong work.
YouTube is getting all the platforms that are getting criticism about bad content appearing on the site. YouTube in particular is getting a lot of grief back then. And then that sort of conversation about moderation kept going into the pandemic. You and I talked about how around the time how YouTube was going to sort of handle advice about vaccines and all kinds of COVID safety, right? Leading up through the 2020 election, up to January 6th.
So there's a lot of like focus on both YouTube and all the platforms about why are you letting this crazy content on your site, this could be harmful, this is just odious advertisers don't want to be around it. It seems like the pendulum has shifted among sort of tech companies broadly sort of away from doing a lot of moderation to less moderation. Do you feel that at YouTube? Do you feel like you guys are sort of either rethinking or have relaxed sort of the way you approach moderation?
I would say a few things about that. So that has been, and you and I have talked about this many times, Peter, that has been for several years and will continue to remain my top priority. It is the thing that I focus on, ask the company to focus on before anything else. And you know, you might say, well, why do you do that or what the reason is? I actually think it's too full. One is I think it's the right thing of course for us to do.
But secondly, I think it's obviously important for our business. And so that's kind of like the first part of that, that's sort of like the principal piece. The other thing that I would say is that the core principles of our approach to content on our platform, how our platform works, hasn't changed. It's based on basically these sort of two competing core principles, which is as I said in our mission, it's to give everyone a voice. We are an open platform.
There's a vast diversity of opinions on our platform, all sides of the spectrum, different topics, what have you. But it has never, ever been anything goes. We've always had rules of the road. And you're right, we dramatically strengthened and built out the capabilities to enforce those rules of the road several years ago. But that remains the foundational element of YouTube. It hasn't changed.
Right. So what I'm saying is, do you feel that vibe shift broadly and do you think, well, maybe you know, a lot of folks, you know, you saw Mark Zuckerberg put out a note to Congress saying, we probably overmoderated during COVID and some of that he blamed on the government but some of it he said, well, this is sort of our responsibility. Have you replayed decisions you guys made about what kind of videos could go up? I mean, it's confusing, right?
Because you had, you were looking for the CDC for guidance. You also had a president saying you should drink bleach or maybe use hypermectin. And other platforms were equipped to figure this out, but have you rethought sort of how you moderated content during COVID, but just more broadly over the last few years? The principles by which we write the rules of the road, if you will, are community guidelines haven't changed.
And those have been consistent and my view is they're going to remain consistent. Having said that, context is important. And we are always speaking with experts, understanding the landscape out there in terms of content that's showing up on our platform or not. And we have to remain nimble not on the principles. Those should be core and bedrock to what we do, but in terms of things like enforcement guidelines or how those things change. COVID is a good example.
So if you think about COVID back up to March of 2020, like literally the science was being created every single week. You remember early in the pandemic, there were people who were climbing cell towers because it was all of a sudden now being spread by 5G. That was a medical misinformation vector that didn't even exist like five days before it became an amp in. So that was the huge issue at the government saying don't wear masks. All those things, right?
And so what I'm describing is, an important aspect of context is like something that was an acute crisis that we all is society and people around the world were trying to get our handles on protecting our family, kids, et cetera. To one where now it is part of the broader sort of, whatever, health, landscape or what have you. And that's a change in context that I think has to be reflected in how you have enforcement guidelines.
But the core principle around medical misinformation and things like that shouldn't change. And enforcement guidelines and tactics should be flexible. But the core principle is I think have to remain foundational to how you operate a platform. So here's a hypothetical, but not that hypothetical scenario. I assume you have thought about it. Sometime in November, we're going to have an election. There's a scenario where Donald Trump loses, is declared the loser by news organizations, et cetera.
Donald Trump and his allies say this is not true. We're going to fight this. We're going to basically replace, stop the steal. We thought about how you're going to handle people saying that the election was fraudulent, there's election fraud, any version of that. So I'll say a few things. First, just like 2020 and 2022, and the dozens and dozens of elections around the world. Responsibility is our top priority. I have a team that is focused on election integrity.
We just concluded the world's largest election that happened over six, seven weeks in India, where we went through a lot of this and had to remain vigilant, and the US election is not going to be different in that context. And so all the tools that we have learned have been effective here are going to be tools and capabilities that we're going to have in place.
And so if you give me a couple of seconds, I'll sort of explain at least sort of the hierarchy in my standpoint, which is first and foremost, and really where a lot of the action happens on a platform like YouTube is making sure that we're actually raising up content that comes from authoritative sources. And that's not my definition of authoritative. We're transparent. We publish. It's determined by third party raiders. You know all of that. And that's what happens on YouTube.
You go to YouTube, you're looking for information. And so you should get it from those types of sources, whether that's CNN or the New York Times or Fox News or what have you. That's going to be first and foremost. And actually, it's not what gets talked a lot about, but that's actually what users experience. That's the first thing, our election integrity, our rules of the road are pretty clear. We are going to enforce those regardless of, you know, what happens there.
But the other thing that's also very important is we have these core principles, but we also need to remain flexible to what's actually happening in the environment. And we will be in this case as well. I still feel like I understand what you're going to do if we have a replay of 2020 where this year's equivalent of Rudy Giuliani is running around with Donald Trump saying, there's fraud here. There's fraud there. Making up claims.
You guys aren't in a position to evaluate whether they're making up those claims. Do you allow them to sort of put those on YouTube? Do you allow people to report on those claims? Generally speaking, we are an open platform of really wide political discourse. And as you know, leading up to an election, post an election, a lot of that political discourse is very heated, lots of opinions flying around.
And the basis for how YouTube works is we allow for that content to exist and for people to access that content. But what's also happening is this content from authoritative sources, news sources that are actually covering the details, the analysis rises to the top in recommendations, but you also see it very visibly in the breaking news shelf when you open up the app in top news when you're searching for that type of information.
So you keep asking about sort of what stays up and what comes down. But what I'm trying to say is that a lot of what's actually important to the user experience is a lot of these partnerships that we have with news organizations and whose content actually shows up when you're looking for. Sounds totally reasonable to me, but I live in reality. I'm a real fact-based person, right? So there's going to be people you know go what happened to someone so conspiracy theorist.
I guess the video is still there, but you're not pushing it to me instead. You're showing me the biased news from ABC or CNN or New York Times and you're not giving me what I want. You are engaged in bias, you're engaged in some sort of censorship. We can do a couple of things. First is we have to be clear in terms of our principles, like hopefully I've been able to articulate for you here. And then we have to be transparent about what our community guidelines are.
And then we have to do our best to actually enforce against those. And we're going to get criticized regardless of the types of decisions we make. But our duty is to be principled about it, transparent about it, and to have really high quality enforcement around our rules of the road. You're focused on an election scenario here and so we're focused very much on sort of election misinfo and things like that. But remember, our entire community guidelines and policy framework is at play here.
So for example, if there's content that is about incitement to violence, then that's a very clear line to real world violence that's happening. And so we have policies around that that would require us to remove the content in order to protect our users. And so there's a whole rubric that comes into play. And so that's the challenge with hypotheticals. It's like it sort of ignores all these other sort of things that can come into play. But it's just barely hypothetical, right?
We ran through this scenario once. We're talking about rerunning it. Do you ever sort of look longingly over at Elon Musk and what he's doing at Twitter and go, man, my job is much easier if we just didn't really involve ourselves in moderation very much at all? I think that approach to responsibility, how we think about our community guidelines is core to how YouTube operates. It's what our users expect of us. It's what our creators expect.
And it's what our advertiser and brand partners expect on YouTube. And you should expect us to continue with those core principles. So Elon Musk is in a big fight with Brazil over Twitter and adjacent stuff there. We had to shut down the service there or was forced to shut down or shut down on his own. The CEO of Telegram just got arrested in France for rather not moderating the platform or not helping authorities.
Do you think about how YouTube is going to operate in all these different countries, the whole bunch of different ideologies, prejudice is not prejudices, you're an American company based in California. You've been dealing with this forever, right? You're a global company, so you have to deal with it. Do you feel that's more fraught now than it was a few years ago? You're right. We are a global company. Two billion people come to the platform. They're from all over the world.
There are many, many cultures and norms and all over the world in which we operate. Our core approach, my core approach has been a lot of the principles that form the foundation of how we think about content on the platform. It's better if those are as universal as possible. I don't mean just from a practical enforcement standpoint, although that's one aspect. Having said that, they're not right each country. That's what I'm saying.
Having said that, nuance and individual context of different countries, sometimes even within a single country, regional nuances, all those types of things, of course they matter. What we try to do is to have a global set of principles, but actually have it so that the enforcement guidelines take that into account. For example, when it comes to our approach to hateful or violent content, there are different examples of that in different parts of the world.
Cast might be much more relevant in one part of the world than it is in another. It's our job to try to enforce on those types of things. That's generally been our approach. Do you feel that there's a rise in individual countries, individual leaders saying, oh, there's a precedent for this. I can get the platforms to do whatever I want. I don't have to be beholden to do someone in California in terms of how this thing is going to work here. They're asking more of you or demanding more of you.
I think it's certainly the case that as the role of YouTube continues to grow in these countries all over the world for viewers, for also for creators, the creator economy, it is natural for governments and elected leaders to actually take more interest in it. I see it. I see it in all parts of the world, Europe, all over various parts of Asia.
Personally, I think that some of that is there's an understandable interest that governments take because at the end of the day, they're trying to represent from their view the best interests of their society and YouTube operates in that society. What happens on YouTube happens in the real world and what happens in the real world happens on YouTube. That's not surprising to me. What do you think with the telegram CEO got arrested in France last month?
Everything that I've seen has been the same stuff that you've seen. I have no particular insight into it. I don't run a big user-generated content platform slash network. Do you think, oh, maybe I'll get arrested in France or some other country now? I mean, that has not occurred to me. You really have that. But you literally didn't think about it? I mean, I think that YouTube is, we have had a long-standing history of having community guidelines and content moderation on our platform.
We have conversations with governments and regulators. It's no secret on a regular basis, getting their opinions about the impact of YouTube. We adhere to legal requests that we get from various governments. Obviously, we have a team that does a full analysis to actually make sure that it is a true and warranted legal request. But that's been the way that YouTube has operated for years now throughout the world. You are not worried about getting jail. I mean, not today.
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Why do you run that business? It's a big business. It seems to be successful for you. But it's so radically different than the user generated content model. You're paying the likes of a Turner Disney whomever for content and passing the cost on to consumers. It's radically different. What's the point of it for you guys? Are you a subscriber? Well, who do live TV subscriber? We got to get you to try that one of these days. That'll be my goal.
Look, I think it goes again back to what I said about sort of what our core mission is, how we think about our viewers when they come to YouTube in general. And there's obviously there are two separate apps, but think about sort of coming to YouTube as an YouTube the brand. The promise is that you should be able to find all the content that you love.
And so there is a class of content, you know what it is, that sort of lives in that linear world, you know, news, but primarily sports related content. And the thought was that if we were reimagining the way that that part of the video kind of world worked, how would we do it? And that's where YouTube TV came from. And it's been something that, you know, obviously I'm very happy with it from a product innovation standpoint.
And I'm also happy with the impact that it's had on the industry, including all of our partnerships with the various sports, you know, providers and the like. Everything you're talking about why YouTube works and why it's different and this relationship with none of that sort of applies to me watching Monday night football last night, whether I watch YouTube TV or Hulu or wherever else. It's really separate from the sort of conventional YouTube platform experience. And it's also shrinking.
It's less and less popular every year, right? Court cutters, court never is the number of people who are subscribing to any kind of pay TV product, including what you guys put out. And shrink. So consumers seemed like they're less interested in a year after year. So why are you guys putting more money, spending more time on it? Well, I think that the core premise of what you just ask is I'm not sure I agree with it.
I think that if you're a sports fan today, particularly if you're a young sports fan, I see this at my own household is that that line is like a blurry line. It's an artificial construct that you're describing. It happens to be that, you know, we have these sort of two standalone apps, but they don't have to be that way.
Just think about if the user experience was basically a singular app and the expectation of fans, we're talking about sports fans here, but I would argue the expectation of all viewers is all of that content should be available seamlessly to them. Yeah, but one thing is free and another thing called 75 bucks a month.
And that's sort of the world that it came from, but as you see, and you're seeing this with kind of how that landscape is playing out, you're finding that content increasingly in different sorts of places. We have hundreds of millions of sports fans that come to YouTube. They of course are not just consuming, you know, creator commentary and highlight clips. That's a big part of it, but they are also watching the live games.
And so how would we create an experience that has to live in the world that exists today around those types of media relationships, but create what we think is going to be the future experience, which is this sort of blended creator forward way of actually consuming these sports. And by the way, but this model is so different, right? You can't get over it. Free versus I'm paying you 74 bucks a month more if I want all the football.
And consumers are, you know, like I said, then that number of people who are paying a monthly fee for pay television is shrinking. You know, month after month, the year after years, they had a great quote from Moffit Nathan said, right, they can't even see a bottom to this shrinkage. Like they don't know when it's going to stop. And you have people churning, right? They people subscribing to YouTube TV to watch football in the fall. And then they churn out in the spring.
So you can tell like there's dissatisfaction sort of with the idea of paying month after month for this stuff. So I've still hung up on why it's appealing to you guys. Well remember, we've always had this twin engine business model. We have been in ad supported business primarily and will be kind of primarily going forward. But we are also a subscription business. And you know, you're focused on a very specific subscription, which is the YouTube TV piece.
By the way, Sunday ticket sort of bolsters all of that and sort of also helps the NFL add on you. Yeah. Helps bridge more of that gap as you're describing between the YouTube TV world and the core YouTube world. It's for the first time ever Sunday tickets available on the core YouTube app. But we have another subscription business with which is YouTube premium. And obviously that's oftentimes associated with music. But it's also people who just love consuming YouTube.
And so I just think that distinction between free versus paid and those types of things are, you know, both those business models exist in this time. One's a great business model, right? Because the users supply the content for free and you pay them either nothing or 55%. And the other is you pay very high fees to the networks, right? They're radically different business models. I would assume that one is much more attractive.
And you know, those business models also continue to change over time too. So in order again to sort of fulfill that core user promise and actually create all of these opportunities for creators, having that type of live content was valuable in that sort of long term game. And so when we said that, we started with this YouTube TV model, another model which is related to it, but different. And I would argue sort of where you'll see future growth is things like primetime channels.
And so in that environment, primetime channel is being able to actually subscribe again. So it's still paid to particular content, particular channel. I'm subscribing to max through you guys. That kind of example available on the main app. And so again, it's back to this promise.
If you are a fan of a Mac show, but also fan of these sorts of creators, having all of that be available in one single place, I do think is a true valuable sort of value proposition for the YouTube viewer and actually think in the long run, you know, an advantage or something that distinguishes us from other services that are out there.
And so you have to think about it sort of in that broader picture as opposed to something that is a static kind of world view today versus, you know, kind of linear versus, you know, streaming, for example. You guys are in your second season of selling us NFL Sunday ticket package. You guys haven't put out numbers about that? We have not put out numbers. Your choice is the NFL's choice. You know, it's, I can't speak to their choice, but it's, it's our choice. How's it going to happen?
I've been very happy with it season one. I think I've shared this with you before. We're in the very, very early days of season two, but I'm happy with, again, for us for me, it really does start with a core product experience. I don't know if you're a Sunday ticket subscriber, but it is, we're going to have to sign you up on my, I watch a little bit, but I'm on soccer. I'm full up on TV time, I think. Okay. But thank you for the offer.
But what, but just, you know, a lot of it starts with the product innovation. So even if you haven't, if you're not a subscriber, you've heard about things like multi-view and how that works. That's what we started with last year. This year we have even more features that our fans love. And again, remember Sunday ticket is definitely a kind of like superfan type of a product.
So we have squeezed backs where you have, you know, your fantasy integrations and you can consume it sort of through that sort of lens. And so imagine a scenario where you have, you know, your home game, but a couple of out of market games, you might have red zone. And then you have the ability actually incorporate what your fantasy team is doing. And so I'm happy with that aspect. I'm also happy with the fact that we're building on a lot of what we did in season one.
And I think it's becoming kind of a standard kind of like a leader in the industry in terms of how we bring creator integrations to the table. And this is where I have to give a lot of credit to the NFL. I really do think that they have been forward looking in this regard.
I think it was one of the reasons why YouTube was so attracted for them is that in order for them to continue their popularity with the next generation of fans, really incorporating YouTubers into their production behind the scenes or what have you. So I'm happy with that part of the story as well. Amazon just picked up a digital package from the NBA, your big NBA fan.
I'd heard and I think there's been some reporting out that you guys made a bid sort of last minute for that package of NBA rights. Is that true? Look, we talk to the NBA all the time. They have been a super long standing partner almost probably for a couple decades now. They operate very large channels. The teams operate channels. I'm not going to comment anything specific other than the fact that I remain a very ardent warriors fan. Warriors. I give you some grief about that.
Did you see that as the future of big time pro sports in general that these are going to be mostly distributed through digital and sort of all of card and people can dip in and out of them? First of all, the space is incredibly dynamic. It's always been incredibly competitive and dynamic, but this is really sort of I think a peak of that. I would say it's related to what we were talking about earlier.
Your questions about YouTube TV and the like and what I was trying to say is exactly this, which is it is a really dynamic space. Lots and lots of things are changing here. Do I think that the current model will be exactly the way it is a few years from now? No. I think that we're going through an evolution of that. I think it's going to change both by how the sports leagues are thinking about it, but also obviously all of these alternatives that we all have as consumers.
I think that frankly, personally, I think that in the long run, it's going to lead to more innovation. The other core principle in the long run is that we all as consumers ultimately get to decide. Do you think the leagues, when do you think the leagues will, a major league will take all or most of their stuff off of traditional broadcasts and make it all digital? Your guess is as good as mine on that piece. Even in the NBA construct, there were pieces of both of those as you saw.
Right now, they want both. They want a traditional TV that has reached and also there's still paying a lot of money, but digital, you could get a lot more money over time, and plus the viewers are going to be there. I think that lots of things can change over the lifetime of a deal. The way that we have thought about, or at least the way I've thought about sports is that it's not about for us at least about attracting new viewers or what have you. Those sports fans are already on YouTube.
They might be consuming content on another platform, another service, but they're also on YouTube consuming maybe other content, maybe highlights, maybe sort of creator view, shoulder content, what have you. We carry lots of live sports content. We're very US-focused in this conversation, but in other parts of the world, your favorite sport, we carry polystyles in Brazil, for example. That's always going to be part of our promise to sports fans. I do think it matters.
My experience also is that viewers get to tell us how they want to consume this type of content, and that's really the way we think about it at YouTube. Everybody for one last sort of wheel screeching pivot break. Let's see where you're going to go now. We're in New York yesterday when you're in Virginia testifying. Look at that smile on your face. One of two antitrust suits the US government is bringing against your parent company, Google.
I'm not going to ask you about that suit because I don't think it would be a useful exchange of conversation. I do want to ask you about where YouTube sits in the Google hierarchy. One of the things that the US government might ask for is a breakup of Google. People talk about breaking up YouTube from Google quite often. Can YouTube survive on its own? Or another way of putting it is why does it benefit YouTube to be part of Google?
Yeah, I mean, it's not a hypothetical that I even really consider to be honest. I haven't put much thought to it. I think that if you think about Google's broad mission, about our information mission, how we think about users, our focus on users. I think YouTube sort of sits firmly and squarely in that construct. So if you think about it from a company perspective, YouTube is really one of those products in our portfolio that allows us to deliver on our mission. And it's as simple as that.
But operationally, could it run as a standalone company at this point? Or does it need Google to make it work? I mean, certainly being part of Google has allowed us to bring enormous sets of capabilities and things like that to our viewers. In fact, this made on YouTube event tomorrow is a great example of that. One of the things that we'll be talking about is where we've this conversation started. These AI-driven tools.
Well, that's a deep collaboration between YouTube because we are touching the creators working with them every day. And our sister company, Google DeepMind. And that is something that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for these two parts of Google collaborating so closely together in a way that works for our creators. I think you've thought about this at least once. You know, like I said, this is a perfect example of that type of a combination bringing real benefits to our creators and users.
And so I think at the end of the day, it's about delivering products that our users love. And that happens because Google is part of YouTube. Neil, thank you for your time. YouTube is part of Google, rather. Oh, I just interrupted. But I was saying, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being with you. Thanks again to Neil Mohan. Thanks again to the many, many people at YouTube who helped record this conversation. I appreciate you guys. You're too bored.
Thanks to you guys for listening. Thanks for your Lonnie for editing and producing this show. We will see you next week. This is Advertiser Content. Food prices are just too high. Kamala Harris has a plan to bring costs down. She'll work to pass the first ever federal ban on price-couging on food. Donald Trump, on the other hand, he'd impose what is effectively a national sales tax, a Trump tax on food, gas, and more. It'll cost a typical family $3,900 a year. We can't afford to go back.
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