YouSaid · the spoken record

Neal Mohan

lines on the record: 91
first: 2021-08-03
most recent: 2021-08-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“From a product standpoint, policy standpoint around our responsibility efforts. So that's one thing I know, even though we're not in planning season for next year that I think will be at the top of the list will be that because it always is.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we touched on so much here. I think that I'll just say at the highest level, you should, like I said, you should continue to see us invest both on the creator side and the viewer side around the concept of mobile creation shorts as one example of that. We talked a lot about that. So continue to see that. Another big area of investment is just continue to develop streams for monetization for our creators. I talked about Super Thanks. We literally just launched that like a week or two ago. There's more to be done there. One area that we didn't talk about that's related to that that I'm really excited about because it also helps connect viewers and creators is shopping and commerce. That is something that I think I'm particularly excited about. And then I will say that the thing that I will, I know for sure on the overall roadmap that will remain at the top of it going into next year also is all the work that we do.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, wow. That's really interesting. We spent a lot of the conversation talking about this is in the realm of shorts, for example. As I said, it's not a feature complete product. There's lots of things that I would like to see. I am by no means a talented creator at all, but I play around, obviously, with all of our products. So, you know, you mentioned some of the ones that I would like to see, which are better filter, better editing tools, et cetera, for that product. And of course, I'd like to see it sooner rather than later. But I also know our teams are working on it. That's probably the probably the latest and greatest thing that I've called out. But, you know, I think that if you asked me that two weeks ago, I probably would have said a different set of features.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I may not have all the details on that specifically, but there's lots of pieces that go into that. But again, like I said, I know that's something that our users have asked for. Are you looking for that around normal picture and picture use cases like sports?”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is not something that I think I have a timeline on, and there's more to that than just some of the technology enablement, but I don't think I have a timeline to give you on that today.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I shouldn't talk about sort of how we're thinking about it in the future. What I will say is there's the economic realities of how content pricing works and the like. A lot of what you've seen in YouTube TV in terms of the new channels that we've added have been driven by user demand, users have asked for that content to be explicitly added to the bundle, quote unquote, as it exists on YouTube TV. So that's what you've seen there. We are also very focused on making it easy for users to add add-ons to give them the flexibility of what else they're looking for in the package. And we're also, you've probably seen this, but we're also doing more around content vertical type bundles or even feature type bundles, right? Like you saw that with the 4K bundle on YouTube TV. So we're trying to bring more choice to our users. A lot of it is frankly just driven by the feedback that we hear from YouTube TV users. But we're not, there's not like another any sort of price hiker or anything.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“YouTube T Another product that you aren't responsible for recapitulates a cable bundle. The price of it is going back up towards the price of a standard cable bundle. What's the future of that product? Does it remain a big linear TV bundle? Are you going to disaggregate it in some way?”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Answer that that is a lightning round question. I don't see that in any time in the near future. There's two different use cases there, as you know through your own experience. Linear broadcaster cable is still very different. Primarily driven by things like views in sports from video on demand world of YouTube. Stay tuned for how we're thinking about those things kind of in the future. But today they're very different experiences.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, I'll put it at the top of the pile. YouTube viewership on TVs, smart TVs in particular, skyrocketing. You also make YouTube TV. So now you have two apps with very different business models that are competitive. Do you think Core YouTube will overtake YouTube TV”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is a good question. So, I can't, again, I can't give you specific timelines, but you should know that that's not the first time I've heard that request.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think I can get into the specifics of that, but I'll just say that our goal is to try to bring all of these features to all of our surfaces as quickly as possible. And sometimes we're just constrained by kind of the reality of the various platforms. But the goal from a product standpoint is to try to bring it as quickly as we can to all of our services.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's everything I talked about with respect to our responsibility as a global platform is something that I pay attention to. Susan pays attention to. It is literally my number one priority. It is the thing that I pay attention to more than anything else. And the reason I pay attention to it is less for the reasons you're describing and more because I believe it is a fundamental part of our viewers and our creators and our partners experience. So it is my number one priority. It is the highest set of OKRs and goals that I have and my team has. And that's the reason why we're focused on it. It's the reason why we have thousands of people working on it every single day.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things I hear from people in sort of the larger conversation around platform moderation is we spend all of our time looking at Twitter and all of our time yelling at Facebook. And YouTube kind of slides are along in the background. And I hear it, it's a frustration I hear from academics and even other reporters that YouTube doesn't seem to get the attention that Twitter in particular Twitter gets. Are you still paying attention to the debates though around 230 around the guidelines for misinformation? Does that influence you? Are you waiting for someone in Congress to wake up and haul you in front of a hearing?”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have kind of multiple components of this, but at the highest level, we do have employees of YouTube that are part of that team. And then we also have an extended workforce in offices all over the world where we work with partners to really kind of wrap that up in terms of scale and numbers. And they're all incredibly highly trained, always going through training in terms of new policies and enforcement guidelines, also are provided resources in terms of helping address a lot of the challenges of the work because it is obviously very challenging work. And so it's a combination of full-time YouTube employees as well as our extended workforce.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they bring us scale and speed, but also highly trained individuals that can take our enforcement guidelines and apply them to videos in a systematic way thousands and thousands of times a day to achieve the best possible results.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a highly trained group of individuals all over the world to be able to make the actual decisions, the nuanced decisions around content. What machine learning classifiers are really good at is identifying a set of videos or comments or what have you that are candidates for potentially being violative of our community guidelines, but where they often fall short is in terms of the actual decisions about whether that candidate video is actually truly violative or not. My learning over the course of the last three to four years of really being focused on this, and again, this is one of the reasons why it's such a core part of our product organization is those two things are fundamentally tied together. In order to achieve what we are looking to achieve and drive that sort of violative view rate number down as low as possible, it really has to be a combination of machines.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's a really interesting lens to look at. And I would say. The common thread between those two pieces is what I believe technology is good at, what machine learning classifiers can do well is around scale and speed. That kind of sounds obvious, but that is where a lot of the focus here is. And in the realm of content ID, I believe that it has served rights holders as well as content creators well, as I described. There's always more we can do. But in general, that has been a system that has enabled billions of dollars worth of economic value for both of those constituents over the course of many years on our platform. I would say the difference between something like that and the broad realm of content moderation is machine learning and algorithms can do sort of that first part around scale and speed, but I have also learned that it is important to”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I want to tie these two ideas together and then I have a little lightning round for you. I have a laundry list of feature requests for you. Don't worry about it. Content ID, though, is the largest automated content moderation system at scale, right? It has a bunch of constraints, but it runs and it does stuff and people can issue strikes and it is contentious. And you probably know more about the pitfalls of automated content moderation than anybody, except for maybe the people on your team who actually run it. Next to that, you have a recommendations algorithm. You have principles around it. You have community guidelines, you have AI content moderation, right? It's all building towards another kind of automated moderation system. What have you learned from content ID that's going to shape the future of your community guidelines moderation? And what are you going to avoid?”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that one area that we have been focused on is really around ease of use and transparency, right? You described DMCA, you describe all of these sort of constraints. That's what really complicated world that exists out there. There's lots and lots of lawyers that are very focused on it in terms of both protecting rights, creating fair use use cases, et cetera. So I think one of the things that YouTube has done, and I think we can continue to do is just offer more transparency on that in our tool set. So how do we build, you know, kind of those capabilities for our creators and rights holders in a seamless way? We've done that. I also think that accessibility of the tools, that's an area that we've been very focused on. I think you've seen over just over the last couple of years how we've expanded access to those tools in a way that works for a much larger set of creators. So those are the types of things that I think you can see us continue to.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I would say that, again, just from a product and technology standpoint, I do think that it is one of the most critical aspects of the YouTube experience for our creators, but also for our rights holders. And in some sense, it's what has enabled a lot of the incredible sort of user experiences that happen on YouTube. Again, like I've said with our other product areas, all of these products are capabilities that we want to continue to make better year on year, kind of month on month. I would say that when it comes to content ID, we really do try to strike the balance as best as possible. You mentioned some of the constraints, of course, that, you know, this whole world exists under. Again, tying it back to principles, our core principle there is trying to balance the needs of rights holders with content creators on our platform. For example, if we're having a product.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, yes, I look at things like, are we doing a good job of raising up authoritative content, especially in those contexts that I described? It is a continuous journey. I will be the first to say that we are not perfect and we can always get better. We also do the same thing on the reduce side. I gave you sort of a very detailed explanation of sort of how that works. And so that's what my team is focused on, kind of on a weekly basis. And we do measure ourselves on those in terms of whether we're hitting those metrics. I gave you VVR as one example. There's others on the flip side, on the authoritative side. And that is the best way I know how to make sure that our recommendations are doing what we think is the right thing by our viewers and our creators.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, as you can imagine, there's a lot to that question. You know, we have looked at this internally. There have been external studies on this. There was one a few months ago that was, I think, a joint study at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard that didn't find any of this. They felt that YouTube viewership was really just kind of a reflection of media consumption habits in the world in general. And so there's been studies in both directions. You know, it's obviously a really hard thing to measure because each individual user's journey is different. That's not to say that I'm dismissing any individual viewers or users' own experience. I'll just point back to the fact that the best way I know how to address all of this in a holistic sense is to really focus on those two pillars of raise and reduce. That is a way that we can determine sort of what our North Star principles and metrics should be and really work towards them.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now it's called Vildive View Rate and VVR for short. And I think the latest number that we had was, I think somewhere on the order of like 0.16 to 0.18%. I mean, it fluctuates, of course, but that is a core North Star metric that this team would be, you know, OKRdon. What it measures is in a sample-based way the number of videos weighted by viewership or views or what have you that were deemed to be sort of filative of our community guidelines. And of course, the goal of our teams, the KPI, two-year term, is to drive that down to as near as possible to zero. That is a challenging task. We've driven that number down dramatically over the course of the last year and a half, two years since we've been measuring that in earnest. But that's an example of something that that team would get.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into the overall KPIs of how that team thought about it. We've evolved since then, recognizing that it's not just about that type of engagement. It's about satisfaction, long-term satisfaction of our viewers. And that's why you see some of those questions that you get directly in the feed that ask you how you felt about that video, that channel, or what have you. That was sort of an evolution. And so KPIs then evolve around sort of satisfaction of our users. And then we've layered another on top of that, which is related to this overall responsibility framework that I described, which is how do we measure whether we are doing a good job in our recommendation algorithms to raise up authoritative content or reduce some of this borderline content or however you want to call it. And so we have KPIs around that. One of the ones that combines a number of these R's is one that we actually released a couple months ago.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we have, so what I'll say is it is our recommendations team is a fairly large team across YouTube. So it's not just one product manager. There's a number of them. But I'll give you a few things. And maybe to give you even more insight is I'll actually sort of give you sort of kind of the full picture. So if you, and you've been obviously very familiar with YouTube since the early days, you'll remember that in the very early days, you know, one of the things that we looked at were things like views of a video, right? Is that as a signal of whether that video was interesting or not or what have you? That was obviously not sufficient, right? Because it would lead to some of the things that you mentioned earlier, like, you know, whatever, clickbaity thumbnails or what have you. And then we evolved to measuring not just the views, but the viewership of the videos. Like are people actually watching the entire video or what have you, that sort of fact.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are in feet in many places, I think is received on the order of 600 billion impressions since March of last year. And we're going to continue to run because we believe it's a good source of information as users are making decisions with respect to the health of their family, whether they should get vaccinated or not. And so it's really raise and reduce our yes about recommendations, but they're also about all of these other products that we give to our users.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I can't get into the specific numbers of the team, but there's dozens of engineers and product managers and UX designers who are making tweaks and improvements to our algorithms on a regular basis. By the way, one thing that I will just clarify is it's not just about recommendations and ranking in our home feed on search, et cetera. It's also about products and features that we bring to bear, like information panels or search result panels. So for example, if you search for COVID information or coronavirus information on YouTube, you will get a full panel that has information, including text, from health authorities, whether it's the CDC or at other parts of the world, the World Health Organization or whoever their national health authority is. And so it's not just about how our recommendation algorithms work. It's about how the entire product works. In fact, that COVID panel that you've probably seen underneath videos.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Focus on two of the R's raise and reduce. That's the recommendation algorithm. We're going to show more people good videos, authoritative videos. We're going to show fewer people the videos that are fuzzy. How big is the team that runs the recommendation algorithm?”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Viewing them as two separate things is actually doing a disservice to the entire ecosystem. It is creating a situation where you can't actually develop the right set of products and services you need to address this challenge in a holistic fashion. You just focus sort of myopically on one sliver of it that I would argue is actually in some ways maybe the most high profile because it's very clear to see. But in other ways the least impactful in terms of what's actually happening on the platform. So that's a bit of a long answer to your question, but I wanted to give you that full color.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first are, but don't realize that those other three R's oftentimes play an order or two orders of magnitude more impactful role in terms of number of videos on YouTube than just what we remove. And all of that is seamlessly integrated into how the product works. Everything I described to you is around our ranking algorithms in terms of how does it UX works, like where are these shells show up? How do they show up? What's the language of them? Can they click through, et cetera? So how our monetization programs work.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Health authorities, etc. So we raise up authoritative content when it comes to people looking for news or medical misinformation, critical information like that. We also reduce content in our recommendations and ranking algorithms when they are not clearly community guideline violative, but could be borderline for other reasons, you know, harmful misinformation, et cetera, where oftentimes the lines are very blurry and not clear, right? What's the line between political speech and misinformation? We might reduce the recommendations of that type of content in users' users' feeds. That's kind of the third R. And we bring it all together with the fourth R, which is we call reward, which is orienting the monetization resources towards those creators that are looking to do the right thing, build an audience, build a business on YouTube. And so I just would say that all four of those R's are actually what govern kind of the overall experience for our users. And we tend to always focus the conversation.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Itself for our users. What I mean by that is it's not just about videos that come down or stay up. It's also about how our recommendation systems work. It's about how ranking systems work. It's about how our search systems work. It's also about how creators, you know, 99.9% of homework looking to do the right thing are rewarded in terms of our responsibility to our ecosystem, to all of our viewers as a global platform, the way I think about it is this 4Rs framework that we have. You know, again, going back to sort of first principles and frameworks and only the first R is about removing content that's violative of our community guidelines. But we have three other R's, raising up authoritative content. You've seen this in the context of the pandemic that we're living through. We have information panels. We have a COVID news shelf that runs on your home feed every single day that has videos from authoritative news sources, from”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's hard to imagine a YouTube product experience without taking into account how the community guidelines impact our viewers and our creators. We spent the last hour talking about all of these products and features and the decisions that go behind creating them. Well, I would argue that a core part of that overall product experience for our entire ecosystem, viewers, creators, advertisers are our community guidelines and how they work. So that's the first thing that I would say. The second thing is a little bit more subtle, but I think in some ways is even more critical in terms of how YouTube works, which is when we talk about content moderation or community guidelines or what have you, we tend to focus on the very, very small portion of what happens there, which is videos that stay up or come down on the platform. And that is not by any means the be-all and end-all of how content manifests.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're starting in 10 countries, although we want to expand that very quickly. And every single month, based on viewership metrics, engagement metrics at the channel level for those shorts creators. And you have to obviously have created a short in the last, I think, 180 days is the cutoff we have right now. You will then qualify for a payment, which as you described, is between $100 and $10,000. That criteria could change, but it's roughly in the order of viewership and engagement. But that's one of the things we want to learn is how do we actually measure that well? How do we measure that in a way that can be transparent with our creators? And I think a lot of that learning will come about through the shorts fund. It might vary regionally because audiences are different in different regions. So it's kind of the addressable sort of viewership is different. And so those are all of the types of things that we're looking at, but that's roughly.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I'll say a few things about it. First, it is really kind of a first step. That's why we've described it as a finite shorts fund, right? I think it's $100 million through the end of next year because it is a means by which I think our goal or my team's goal is to develop what we hope will be the long-term sort of scalable monetization program for shorts. So I think you should put it in that context, which is a way to get going and to actually really start to figure out a way to do precisely what you're saying, describe how monetization can work for shorts creators. Because you're right, the experience is very different, right? Like you're essentially consuming a feed of shorts. And so that the model has to work differently. And so the way it's going to work in the near term is, you know, you obviously have kind of the standard sort of eligibility criteria, right? In good standing in terms of our community guidelines, you know, over 13 years old.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every week, probably not. That's all very direct, right? Even the advertising products in traditional YouTube is very direct, right? You watch the video, there's some breaks, the ads play, some percentage of that revenue goes to the creator. With shorts, there's not a one-to-one, right? You watch shorts, you scroll an interstitial plays, and then this new shorts program is going to deliver bonus payments somehow from $100 to $10,000. How does that program actually work? How do you determine the value that creators get?”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's really the way I think about it. And the tools that we've built are along those lines, too. You gave an example I thought was neutral. Know how to fix my whatever garage door, what have you? I would say there too, there's a means to actually create a connection between me as the viewer and that particular creator. I had to make an adjustment to the water heater in my house. There was an awesome video on YouTube that enabled me to do it. It probably saved me like two hours of time and probably several hundred dollars, right? To do that. And we just launched a product actually called Super Thanks because it was certainly worth $10 for me to that creator because that creator delivered enormous value for me. Am I going to watch that creator's videos on, you know, heater repair every week? Probably not. But I still connected with that creator. And so that's an example of another monetization product, Super Thanks, that's about connectivity, but also allowing that creator to make money. And so that's sort of how I think about it.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that, I mean, it's sort of, you know, I feel like that audience wouldn't be there if it wasn't for the connection they have with those creators. I mean, you know, I have three kids. Like they have, you know, their favorite sets of creators on our platform. Like, you know, like I said, back to my stage analogy, we want to build the world's best stage, but it really is about the people in the audience connecting with the people that are on the stage. That is the magic of YouTube. That is our creators fan base, the audience that they've built. I mean, our creators say that all the time. We enable it through our platform. Our platform allows them to get scale. One of the cool things that I like about a creator's experience on a platform like YouTube is they can share an idea and it can be received by somebody on the other side of the world in a way that's incredibly powerful and inspiring. And that happens on YouTube all the time. And so.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason why these monetization tools have worked, in my view, so well for our creators is because they're not just about helping the creators make money. They also help them enhance their connection with their fans on YouTube. So look at a product like Super Chat or Super Stickers. Yes, it's a way for a creator to generate revenue from a live chat that's happening on a stream, but it's also a way for them to connect with particular specific users, specific fans, and they give them shout outs and they build a community that way. And those two things are reinforcing. And I think that that is what's really cool about all of these monetization products that we built.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shows on other platforms or on television or what have you. Many of them have built audiences elsewhere, and all of that is awesome from our perspective on YouTube. What I also hear from creators often is that their core sort of most authentic sort of most deeply engaged leaned forward audience, if you will, is on YouTube that I hear that over and over from our largest creators to up-and-coming creators to literally creators who've only been on the platform for a few months. That is the reason why we also want to give them the choice to be able to monetize beyond ads on YouTube itself. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't or can't use other products or capabilities to earn a living on our platform. But what I hear is that sort of seamless integration within YouTube with their core audience is what's powerful. And I'll connect it to what I said previously, which is”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will say that I think it's great that creators have multiple ways that they can generate revenue. I think one of the things, and if you talk to YouTube employees, I think many of them will tell you this. What's really cool and inspiring about YouTube is that it creates this platform for YouTubers where, of course, they can monetize on YouTube. And I gave you like super detailed metrics in terms of how we actually measure the health of that for our creators. But lots of creators start on YouTube, but then they diversify in terms of their revenue streams. I'm sure, I mean, I'm sure I know you talk to YouTubers all the time. Many of them have written books. Many of them have”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To audience. Even a lot of the monetization products we've developed, and now we have, you know, we've spent a lot of time talking about, you know, there's ads, but we have eight or nine other products that allow creators to monetize on our platform. And the fundamental threat to all of them is actually connecting with the audience, whether it's Super Chat or Super Stickers or channel memberships. And so that's always sort of for me the fundamental question that I get when I speak with our creators.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Audience? Are we building products and capabilities that allow them to stop whatever else they were doing and actually earn a living on YouTube if they want to become full-time YouTubers? And those are metrics we look at literally on a kind of weekly, monthly, quarterly basis to make sure that we're doing the right thing by our creators. When I talk to creators, the feedback that I get is around what are you guys doing? What are the new types of tools and capabilities you're building to help me continue to connect better with my audience? Every single question or feature request I get ultimately sort of boils back down to that in some flavor. And there might be a monetization objective behind it. There might be just a growing an audience objective behind it, but it really is about connectivity with the audience. And so I gave you the genesis of shorts. That's one example. Everything I talked to you about with respect to comments and how creators can manage that. It's all about connectivity.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of YouTube teams I'll look at carefully. So that's sort of at the beginning of the journey, if you will. We also, to your second part of your question around monetization, one of the kind of key milestones we look at is how many creators on our platform, new creators are achieving what I would call sort of being able to have a sustainable living on our platform. And we actually measure that not just here in the US, but around the world and we adjust that according to kind of purchasing power parity and the like. Those are not perfect because they're sort of measuring sort of snapshots in time. But again, sort of just to kind of peel the onion back a little bit, those are things that I look at pretty closely because I think they are fundamental ways of answering the questions that you're describing, right? Like are we actually still creating a place for new people with new ideas can come, get started, find an audience? And once they find that.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that the way that I think about it is ultimately the way the YouTube system works, so the way our product works is a reflection of, again, sort of some of these core sort of North Star metrics, how satisfied our viewers are. Are they getting what they want out of their connection with their creators? Similarly for creators, right? We have similar ways of looking at it. And so two things that I'll call out that are even up leveling the way that you described it that I think about are do we feel like the core milestones for our creators are correct and are they healthy, right? So for example, are there lots of creators that are getting started on YouTube? Is it dramatically harder to get started? Is it easier? How do we measure that? What's the velocity of creators getting started? I can tell you that that's something that not just my creator teams, but”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That both in an automated fashion, like moderated comments, a much better ranking of those types of comments, et cetera. And so that's an example of how we've taken feedback from our creators and tried to turn them into tools that allow creators to have a much better experience managing their channels. Okay, we're back. This is where we really started to dig a little deeper into how YouTube as a product can affect creators. From good things like their ways to tip creators if you like their videos to the not so good, like not telling creators what changes are made to the recommendation algorithm.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ongoing conversations with our creators. We get a lot of, I mean, I personally get input from creators along those dimensions, and we have a team on my team that's focused on building out those sets of tools for our creators. You know, we're talking a lot about sort of distribution and monetization. One of the big areas of feedback that I get from our creators related to what you're saying that factors into kind of their overall experience with YouTube is how they interact with their fans. And what I mean by that are the comments below videos. And that is an area that is oftentimes incredibly rich. Like you can see some of the most amazing conversations there around, you know, picking apart like a physics video or something like that. But it's also an area where I feel like sometimes our creators in the past had been getting overwhelmed, right? Just with the sheer volume, for example, or even sometimes the tone of the comments. And so we've built a whole slew of tools to help creators manage.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's a journey that we're on. We need to continue to get better and better at it. But I will also say that we have creators that have been on the platform for three, five, ten years who continue to build a living, continue to build an audience. They're some of the most kind of inspiring, amazing people in the world. They are attuned to their audience. They adjust with their audience. They get feedback from their audience on a regular basis. And they continue to produce incredible awesome content. One of the other areas, though, to your point, which I think was implicit in your question, is how do we give creators the tools that they need to be able to, for example, if they want to take a break, right? Like something as simple as just like literally being able to take a vacation and the like, how do we give them the tools and the insight in terms of whether that actually has an impact in terms of how their videos show up in recommendations, et cetera? Those are always on.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started on our platform to how do they grow their audience? How do they think about monetization, not just ads, but a lot of the new monetization products that we've developed? So we do have teams that are working with our creators. We have ways of doing that, not just for our top creators, but we also have ways of doing that in a scaled fashion for our up and coming creators as well. Those are programs that we've invested in. Could we do more there? Yeah, of course. We could continue to do a lot more there. Every year, I feel like we get a little bit better in terms of explaining all of this and laying this out for our creators so that they can make informed choices. I also recognize that there's lots of things that creators have to think about. Distribution, monetization, our community guidelines, et cetera. So I do think it is my team's responsibility, you know, YouTube's responsibility overall. Susan RCO's talked about this too, of making it easier for our creators to navigate all of this.”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Opacity of the algorithm drives people crazy. Like, I always joke that the life cycle of every YouTuber, it hits a point where they all make a video about how they're mad at YouTube. It's just at the end of one road and then that road branches off. And I think the heart of that is the opacity of how the product works sometimes. How do you balance needing to change me flexible with needing to be explicit and transparent about how your product affects people's money? Yeah. I think it's a really, really interesting question. I would say a few things. I mean, and there's a lot to your question because you talked about money. There's the distribution component, obviously, to that as well. Our job is to be as clear as we possibly can about what works on YouTube, what doesn't work on YouTube. We have entire teams, business-facing teams, creator-facing teams that are focused on helping everything from creators getting”
2021-08-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · YouTube's Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and future for creators · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT