‘Our job is to build the stage for them…build amazing tools’: YouTube’s Neal Mohan on India’s creator economy

YouTube has proven to be a powerful platform for creators to build multimillion-dollar businesses. Alphabet-owned YouTube wants more creators to be on its platform because it helps them boost their user numbers and generate more revenue. India has been a central focus of the Google-owned video platform, home to a diverse set of users…mostly young and looking to come to YouTube for both consumption of content and to be a creator themselves. 

Alphabet-owned YouTube wants more creators to be on its platform. (Image: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)

“I think the key to growth is a generation of users coming online who have known nothing other than their mobile phones and what they experience on it and one of the first places they go to connect with communities and connect with content is YouTube. That’s like a virtuous cycle between creators and viewers that we see in our growth in India,” Mohan explained what’s fueling growth of the platform in India.

Gathered at the historic Pier 57 in Chelsea over the Hudson River on Thursday, Mohan along with key Google executives gave an outline of their plans for the creator economy and how they would like to engage with creators and the music industry going forward. “There are robust ways that we engage on a one-off basis, but also on a continuing basis with our creators,” Mohan said during a question-and-answer session with International media after the event. “A lot of our product teams have direct relationships with creators built up through trust over many years. That’s what makes YouTube unique.”

YouTube is luring both high-profile influencers and creators with millions of followers as well as new and upcoming creators. (Image: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)

In a bid to compete with ByteDance’s TikTok and Meta’s Instagram, YouTube is luring both high-profile influencers and creators with millions of followers as well as new and upcoming creators to be on its platform. “We are about our creators. Every product we build is that way. We’re the largest and original creator economy out there and we intend for that to continue to be one of our strengths,” Mohan said. 

The event’s big announcement seemed geared towards bringing not only new creators to YouTube but also keeping existing creators in the existing creator YouTube ecosystem, and for that, the platform is going all in on generative artificial intelligence. One of them was a new tool called “Dream Screen” that allows creators to generate videos and photos using AI to use in the background of their short-form videos. So if creators have a wacky idea such as “dragon flying over New York City”, they need to type in prompts and AI  generates a corresponding video. Other features include AI-powered suggestions for what videos creators should make next, an automatic dubbing product to translate videos into other languages, and an AI-powered music recommendation system that will take a written description of a creator’s video and suggest audio to use.

Google’s new office space in New York is situated on a pier which looks out over Manhattan and the Hudson River and features a large-scale rooftop park. (Image: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)

“A lot of the foundation models that are the basis of products like Dream Screen are based on Google foundation models,” Mohan said, adding that YouTube builds technology on top of that and turns it into something that can be used by creators. 

YouTube is also doubling down on its micro-video Shorts platform to increase engagement on the platform. And while Shorts has become a major competitor to TikTok – YouTube claims the short-form videos on its platform are averaging 70 billion views daily. That’s good news for YouTube but the platform has yet to monetise those views. “We are investing heavily in shorts,” Mohan said. “A lot of that investment has come because of the impetus we got from creators in the first place.

“It wasn’t an idea that we just invented out of the blue,” Mohan continued. “We were hearing from both established YouTubers and also up-and-coming creators that they wanted something that was mobile-first, they could this kind of kind of supercomputer in their pocket, and really leaned into a shorter form format, vertically oriented.”

The writer was in New York on the invite of YouTube.