I was looking at all these guides that there are to sort of get your things to do well on YouTube. Like what are the hooks? How can you get the algorithm to like you and amplify you? Are you adopting any of them?
I'm Lulu Garcia Navaro and today I'm in Silicon Valley to speak with YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. YouTube is a juggernaut. So, a couple weeks ago, I clicked on this video. The platform is winning the streaming war with Netflix. It's made creators like Mr. Beast and Miss Rachel into huge stars, and it's owning the video podcast space. Add to that its growing distribution business with YouTube TV and the deals with both the NFL and the Oscars, and it's clear YouTube, which is owned by parent company Google, has few if any peers, which is why I wanted to sit down with Neal Mohan. Mohan has been in charge of YouTube since 2023 and has overseen its rapid growth. But that hasn't come without controversy. Just this week, a jury in California found the company negligent alongside Meta for harming a teenager's mental health through their addictive features. And the jury said that YouTube, Google, failed to operate YouTube in a reasonable fashion. That verdict, which YouTube told us they plan to appeal, came down after Mohan and I talked, but we still had a lengthy discussion about YouTube's impact on children and us all. Here's my conversation with YouTube CEO Neal Mohan.
I am very excited to be here today at YouTube. I wanted to start with a statistic. Mr. Beast, of course, the biggest content creator on YouTube, said that humanity now spends 2% of its waking hours on YouTube. I mean, is the goal to make it 3%?
So, I know Jimmy very well. He and I have not done that math together, so I don't think I can validate his math or not. I think our goal, I mean look, we measure ourselves by this concept of whether viewers, all of us, the two billion people that come to YouTube every single day, are satisfied by their experience on YouTube. And so that is how we orient decisions around the product or the business. And we have grown, you know, we're the number one streamer I think for three years running now in the US on television screens. We're an incredibly large podcast platform. You know, this conversation I will watch on YouTube. And so yeah, that has definitely been part of the journey. I'm incredibly proud of it in terms of making some long-term bets that have really paid off for YouTube, but also for our viewers and our creators. I mean, not to be too meta about this, but obviously this is going to go on YouTube. We've got cameras and lights here. And what used to be an audio podcast is now a video podcast. And part of that reason is because this is the way to gain new audiences, to reach people, because everyone seems to be on the platform now.
And what is it that you think makes shows grow and gains an audience? I mean, how do I make this a hit other than like maybe taking a chair and bashing you over the head?
We'll see. When I get asked this question, I think it's in my view very, very simple. And it has to do really with how YouTube works, which is the people that are on the other side of the camera, other side of the screen rather, that are watching you on a television screen or on their mobile phones when they're watching this conversation or even on their desktops or what have you, the one thing they can sus out really, really quickly is if it's truly authentic. And I really do think that if you go and actually spend a minute thinking about any creator's channel, that is really what comes through for the really successful creators.
I want to talk about your competition because you mentioned podcasts. You recently though have had several major podcasters leave YouTube for Netflix. Shows like The Breakfast Club, My Favorite Murder. Are you worried that your biggest stars are going to be signed away to places like Netflix? And we're also, by the way, of course, seeing Meta just announced this week that they were interested in luring some of your creators away. Apple is now talking about obviously getting into the video podcast business more aggressively. I mean, they're taking the things that you built and they're saying, 'Come over here. The water's warm.'
Yeah. You know what, I'd say a couple things about that. So, first, it is flattering that they see us as sort of the center of culture, especially in terms of what these amazing creators have been able to do on YouTube. But the real sort of conversation when I speak to our creators, and I speak to our creators several times a week, of all sizes, really, up and coming creators, some of the very large ones that you've mentioned, what they always tell me is that no matter what they look to do, they understand that YouTube is their home. There would be no Beast Games if there wasn't Mr. Beast on YouTube. And Jimmy knows that and he talks about that. They tell me over and over that their most authentic real audience is on YouTube. They know that is the font of a lot of their success off of YouTube. But if as a result of their success on YouTube, they are also experiencing success in other places, whether it's working with a studio on a project or whether it's writing a book or coming up in the case of Mr. Beast with his chocolate bar or what have you, then I think that's awesome. I have not come across YouTubers that have completely yanked their content off YouTube. I can't imagine why they would do that. And frankly, they're in a position where they can say no to that, right? They don't have to because the nice thing about what they've built on YouTube is that there's other places that are so desperate to actually work with them that they'll acquiesce to what our YouTubers ultimately know is the right decision for them in the long term, which is to never leave their home.
Yeah. I mean it just seems like it's an interesting consequence of the YouTube model because in many ways you're an incubator. You know, you take, like you said, anyone who's got a camera and a dream and they have a shot at getting an audience and connecting with them, but once they get to a certain level of success, it seems like all these other groups are sort of circling to take them away.
And they never leave because they know that their home is on YouTube.
I want to move to another part of your business that you are also really dominating. YouTube TV is now bigger than many of the cable operators, and since 2025, the main way that YouTube is now consumed in the US is on connected television. At the beginning of 2026, you wrote YouTube is the new TV because creators are the new prime time. I think one of the things that has Hollywood nervous is that it's a question of quality too. You know, prestige TV, something that's hard and costly to make. YouTube is mostly not that. I was looking at all these guides that there are to sort of get your things to do well on YouTube. Like what are the hooks? How can you get the algorithm to like you and amplify you? Are you adopting any of them?
But you know, it's all about tapping into a lizard brain and not about maybe elevating things that have a narrative arc, that have character development, that have complex moral decisions. And I'm just wondering, are we losing something with the dominance of the kind of creator economy that YouTube specializes in?
You know, I think this is a conversation that I do think the industry likes to have. And it's often times the industry just sort of talking to itself to be honest. And I think it's presumptuous for us to judge or tell people what is high quality or low quality or prestige or not. At the end of the day, two billion people come to YouTube. Families, parents, young people, college kids, older adults, and they find what they love. And there's every type of creator and every type of genre because it is a reflection of humanity. We have incredible creators that are producing amazing scripted content in Hollywood like Alan Chikin Chow or Kigra Dion who have built soundstages to produce content that engages people incredibly. I would put that up against any sort of quote unquote prestige content out there. I would put Miss Rachel or Mark Rober or Cleo Abram against any sort of quote unquote traditional produced content. And the great thing about it is that when the next Miss Rachel or the next Mark Rober comes along who's even more creative in a different way, they get a shot at it as well as opposed to someone in traditional media saying actually no, I don't think your idea is a good one or it's low quality. Who are we to say that?
Content creators are king, but you are moving into the traditional purview of the networks. You secured exclusive broadcasting rights for events like the Oscars starting in 2029 and currently some NFL games. I've seen of course predictions that this is going to be the death knell for cable and broadcast television because these are such big tentpole events. I mean what is the strategy here? Is it to sort of pick out the biggest events from traditional broadcast television? I mean, is the Super Bowl next and bring it to YouTube?
Well, I mean, I guess the first thing that I would say is if you think about it from a consumer standpoint, a viewer standpoint, especially a younger viewer, their expectation is that when they turn on the TV, that all of what they want to watch and engage with is in the same experience. And so that is everything from a 15-second short, by the way, shorts are, you know, lots of people watch them on televisions, to a 15-minute classic YouTube VOD or long form video to a 3-hour podcast, 1-hour podcast through a 3-hour NFL game or a 15-hour live stream because we have lots of streamers on our platform. And the expectation is that all of that is a seamless experience that they can get through their recommendations on YouTube. And so that's the consumer lens through which we have looked at it. And we made that bet for three reasons. One is could we expand the market by making it easy for fans to actually find football games, whether it was a live game, but our biggest relationship is actually Sunday Ticket, which is a subscription service. And the second was could we bring technological innovation to it. So, multiview, like being able to watch, which people take for granted now, was one of the core innovations we brought to the NFL experience. Creator integrations, right? Like we did this new concept that we call it creator watch with basically the live game, like our Brazil game, which was one of the season openers last year, but watch alongside your favorite creator. And so those are the types of things that we talk about with the NFL. So, when the commissioner and I have a meeting with our teams, that's really what our focus is. I have an 18-year-old son. He's a sports nut. He watches lots of live sports, but his sports highlights are his YouTube feed and the NFL understood that. And so that led to the partnership that we have. And the Oscars actually was a similar type of conversation with the academy.
Since you mentioned the Oscars, did you see Conan O'Brien's skit this year? Where he sort of poked fun at YouTube?
I did. Yeah. Yeah. He had two YouTube jokes actually.
I think Conan is very funny and he's actually a YouTuber. He's been on YouTube for a very long time. His Team Coco channel does really well on YouTube.
Do you think the broadcast networks that have traditionally been the home of these franchises become like the dodo? Because I mean, those are the biggest drivers also for them and you taking that away, I mean kind of like what's left?
Well, you know what's interesting about those partners is they're obviously, as I said, some of our largest, most strategic partners because of YouTube TV, but they are also large partners in the classic sense of being creators on YouTube. Whether they are news, some of the largest news partners on YouTube are Fox News, right? They're very large on our platform. Just like the New York Times has a very large presence on YouTube and the Wall Street Journal or a lot of the entertainment networks, Disney is one of our strategic partners. They have a big investment and presence on YouTube. And so we work closely with them every single day. They understand sort of what's happening in the ecosystem. And I think they also understand that a lot of the fandom around their IP, their franchises, the amount of creativity that comes out of their studios is happening on YouTube. So they really tap into that and they invest in it.
So, we've been talking obviously about the power of video today and I want to get your thoughts on this because I understand that you are a big reader and one of the other big concerns that I hear about this world that we're entering and living in now and sort of embarking on with AI is that, you know, there are studies showing that all our video consumption has ushered in this age of post-literacy. That Gen Z now overwhelmingly prefers to consume visual content on YouTube as opposed to traditional media and that has tracked with a sort of more pronounced drop in reading levels, attention spans. What do you think about YouTube's role in changing the way that we think and our brains?
Yeah, I mean I can answer that and you're, I presumably you're talking about young people and people, you know.
My brain too, though. But yeah.
But you know certainly where the responsibility bar for all of us is very high, which is young people and children. You know I have three kids of my own. So, as a parent, as a dad, I think about their development and, you know, both challenges and opportunities every single day. Like I can say unequivocally, you know, I encourage my kids to go run around and touch grass and, you know, for our youngest, be on the swing set or play basketball with my son and all of those types of things. I encourage that. I encourage them to read as much as they possibly can. You know, I love to read, but my wife and I encourage our kids to do that as well. And on YouTube what I find is there's content as we've described that young people find entertaining and they learn new things on a regular basis.
I mean, do you think it matters that they're learning things? And this isn't a gotcha. This is actually, I'm just genuinely curious. Do you think it matters that they're learning things through video and that that is just sort of changing the way that they absorb information or it doesn't?
I think that video just like reading is an important way for people to learn. When you say the term video it's like learning visually and I see that just like back in the day we learned in the classroom visually from our teachers. I do see a lot of that learning happening on YouTube and actually teachers tell me that all the time too.
And I want to say my daughter's dyslexic and YouTube is a huge part of her life. She learns visually and it's been a godsend for her for all sorts of different reasons. So, this isn't to say that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing.
Yeah. I think that it is, I think about it more in the analogy of like a library and it's a visual library but it's a library that has lots and lots and lots of books in it. And the way that information or knowledge is communicated or new ways of thinking is communicated is visual, audiovisual, and I do think that is an effective way for people to learn. Do I think it's the only way? Of course not.
I want to ask you about a lawsuit that's happening where you're currently along with Meta being sued by a young woman who says YouTube is addictive and harmful when she was a minor and this is considered a landmark case here in California. Do you feel responsibility to remedy the harm if your site is addictive to people?
And I, you know, I shouldn't comment on that specific trial of course, as you can understand. What I will say about, again, and I think I was alluding to some of these things in my earlier answers. The way I think about it is, as you point out, as we were just talking about, you know, YouTube is this platform where people go for many different reasons to, you know, blow off steam, listen to their favorite artists, you know, whatever, Billie Eilish or Taylor Swift or what have you, to connect with community. That's a lot of what happens on YouTube. And then learn things. And so I think the mental model for me is we should be thinking about protecting young people in the digital world as opposed to protecting them from the digital world. And the best analogy I can think about there is, you know, teaching my daughter to ride a bike. Like it starts with training wheels and you take off the training wheels and then eventually she can kind of go and ride her bike.
When you got kids, you know that it's impossible. It's impossible to put guardrails on kids with devices. It's so hard.
Yeah. And that's what I was trying to say, which is I feel like because of that sort of principle of making sure that we're protecting young people in the digital world as opposed to shutting them off from it because I also think it's wrong frankly to eliminate that knowledge, that library of content because there's amazing, wonderful content that parents tell me about every single day just like the experience that you just shared about your daughter. I have that certainly in my household. So, well then how do you approach it? Well, the way I think you approach it is to make it so that what you can do around parental controls as you described or other types of things are actually truly practical and easy to use and that can actually be enforceable. And that's what we can do. And that's what my wife and I try to do in our household. Like you said, we're not perfect by any stretch. But if there are things that we can do at YouTube to make that job easier for parents, I think that's the right approach.
You know, as a parent, which again I know you are, it can often times feel like you're fighting against Silicon Valley. Like it's you trying to put some guardrails and some order in the household and you are fighting against these giant corporations of which you are one. And it feels impossible, it feels for many parents like they just lose the battle.
Yeah, I mean look, I'm a parent of three myself. I think about how young people are growing up today. I think that there are amazing things that happen, that access to information, to knowledge that happen because of platforms like YouTube. I also understand the challenges that you're describing and so it's not to trivialize them in any sense because I experience them and it is something that I personally care deeply about. It's personal to me. Our approach to it is how can we bring all of those awesome experiences that you just described in the context of your daughter that I experience with my own kids but do it in a way where parents are in control and that's what we work towards. And so, you know, we are a platform where we will build things like timers in the app. We announced actually a couple months ago now the ability for parents to actually have a timer on short form video feeds, right? To set it to zero. That's industry-leading. That has not been done before, but that's the way that we make decisions here in terms of putting that responsibility first and foremost and kind of then letting the chips fall where they may.
I do want to talk about content moderation because as YouTube has become bigger and bigger and takes up more of the culture and of people's engagement and the way they get information, the responsibility becomes, I think, greater. Do you feel that responsibility in terms of how things have shifted for YouTube and just having a lot more time spent on the site?
Every single day. It is my top priority in many ways and I often say that, you know, YouTube is a reflection of what's happening in the world but what happens on YouTube also impacts the world and that from my standpoint is the motivation behind the responsibility. There's two billion people that come to YouTube every single day. We do have a responsibility. We are a platform that prides itself on being an open platform without a gatekeeper. We stand for freedom of speech, freedom of expression. But we've had community guidelines on our platform since the day YouTube started. And living up to that responsibility is a big part of what happens around here, literally every single day.
Yeah. I mean, starting in 2020, you deplatformed a number of YouTube accounts for spreading lies. You've replatformed many of them. Most notably Donald Trump. After January 6th, 2021, you had suspended Donald Trump's account. And we should note that YouTube wasn't alone in that. Many other platforms did the same. Trump then sued, accusing you of censorship. And you reinstated his account in 2023. And then Google, your parent company, agreed to pay nearly $25 million to settle the case last year without admitting liability. Were you wrong to ban him in the first place?
I think, I'm trying to think back to the policies that were in place back then. Those, many of those I think are not in place today. You know, we have because of a lot of what we talked about here and the scale of YouTube and what it represents in culture and society, we have a long track record of working with administrations really on both sides of the aisle. And we make our decisions based on what we believe at the moment to be right for the creator ecosystem that we spent the bulk of the time talking about here. And we strive to write our community guidelines in a way, the best as we possibly can. We strive to be truly as much of an open platform as possible.
Was it the wrong decision, do you think, at the time to ban a former president?
I think that, you know, it's hard to look at all of these decisions out of context. You know, you think about, even back to 2020, some of the examples that you were describing there, we were embarking on this pandemic that was going to shut down the world. Science was being created every single day. Did we reverse those policies? Yeah, we changed a lot of those policies because I think that while the principles of, you know, freedom of expression, free speech, remain sort of north star kind of immovable principles, at least at YouTube, we also want to be flexible in terms of the context around policies and what we, you know, back to your question around the president's channel and what around January 6th, that was, I can't remember the very specific policy that was in place then. But that was during that particular time period. Fast forward, a lot of those policies even before, independent of the lawsuit or what have you, were changed.
Deprecated policies, so that's how we try to be flexible about the policies, but also be true to our principles about being an open platform. And so when I took over as CEO, one of the first decisions was to bring that channel back.
