YouTube will be available on all your devices

(Bloomberg) — YouTube CEO Neal Mohan is a good sport.

He’s put a lot of demands on Short films – films that are less than a minute long – and that means exposing himself to silly scenes with the creators to demonstrate the power of the 60-second format. You’ll see him munching on the same slice of pizza with YouTube prankster Eric Decker or pretending to be a naive intern in a parody with influencer Hayley Kalil. In this week’s episode of the Bloomberg Originals series The Circuit, Emily Chang stars as a shy executive at the top of a giant red slide at YouTube headquarters.

But make no mistake: this is serious business. Mohan wants Shorts to be a key driver of the platform’s future growth and a way to compete with the ubiquitous TikTok. This is all part of his bigger plan for YouTube and it covers all your devices.

Despite these antics, Mohan isn’t glamorous in real life (he said his wife calls him “equal Neal”). However, he is one of the pioneers of online advertising. Mohan, the former chief executive of DoubleClick, the display advertising giant that Google bought in 2008 for $3.1 billion, became the head of part of the search engine giant’s massive advertising business. In 2015, he became YouTube’s chief product officer, and in 2023 he became CEO. (YouTube is a unit of Google and both are owned by Alphabet Inc.).

YouTube has come a long way since the salad days, when it was best known for cat videos and makeup tutorials. It is currently the most popular streaming service on television. According to Nielsen’s latest data, it accounts for 9.6% of TV viewing time, followed by Netflix with 7.6%. Further runners-up are Hulu, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+.

People actually pay for the service through a suite of offerings like YouTube Premium and YouTube TV (which has 8 million subscribers), and it’s a key driver of Alphabet’s $15 billion in subscription revenue last year. Needham analyst Laura Martin said that if YouTube were spun off from Google, it would be worth $423 billion. The question is: how does YouTube get even bigger?

According to Mohan, the answer lies in your living room and in the creators to whom YouTube has paid $70 billion over the last three years. No longer limited to mobile devices, YouTube now wants to be on your first, second, and maybe all screens at once.

“We are not a social media platform,” Mohan said. “We are not traditional media in the sense that we are not linear television. We are truly something of ourselves. For me, that means focusing on what we do best, which is a place to create, share and watch videos, no matter where you are in the world or what screen you’re on.”

Mohan, an avid sports fan, made it clear that live sports will continue to be an area of investment, especially after the first season of NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube ends. He sees a key benefit in bringing creators and live sports content together in one place, especially for young people.

But as YouTube’s ambitions have grown, a few of the more homespun players have complained that the platform just isn’t the same anymore. Some well-known creators have left, citing burnout. Running a YouTube channel is a full-time job, and top names like MrBeast, Rhett & Link and Michelle Khare have tons of people supporting them.

YouTube is so big and competes with platforms like Instagram and Tiktok that it’s hard to imagine someone like toy unboxing king Ryan Kaji or leading consumer tech reviewer Marques Brownlee building their massive followings from scratch today.

“I know a lot of creators who either took a break or moved on to other activities,” Mohan said. “Some of them went from being in front of the camera to being behind the camera. Some of them started developing different types of businesses based on their experience on YouTube. I think this is all actually a natural evolution, but it’s also actually really great because it’s a decision they were able to make based on their success on our platform. ”This episode of The Circuit With Emily Chang will debut on Wednesday, May 29 at 6:00 p.m. in New York on Bloomberg Television, the Bloomberg app, Bloomberg.com and the Bloomberg Originals YouTube channel. Check out The Circuit podcast for longer conversations.