Neal Mohan on how YouTube will support creators success across the platform

Just a couple of weeks after taking over as the CEO of YouTube from Susan Wojcicki, Neel Mohan has written a letter to the entire YouTube community, which gives an update on the platform’s key priorities – investing in the creator economy, building for the YouTube of the future, and protecting the YouTube community.

In his letter, Mohan wrote, “As I look ahead to what’s next for YouTube, I’m confident we’ll put our full energy into what matters most for creators and viewers.”

Supporting the Success of Creators

“Creators and artists are the heart of YouTube, and I’ll continue to put them first. In today’s challenging macroeconomic climate, we’re offering opportunities to grow a business on our platform. YouTube’s creative ecosystem supported more than two million jobs in 2021 in Brazil, Canada, the United States, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, France, Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, and Turkey combined, according to research by Oxford Economics,” Mohan wrote.

How YouTube will work to support the success of creators across the platform this year:

Giving creators more ways to make money: YouTube helps creators build deep relationships with audiences and offers them more tools to make a living doing what they love. Hundreds of thousands of channels made money on YouTube for the first time last year. And we’re providing more opportunities for creators outside of ads by expanding our subscriptions business, investing in shopping, and continually improving our paid digital goods offerings. These options for creators make an impact. South Korean creator Jin Yong-jin gained over 30,000 members after launching channel memberships just seven months ago. And more than six million viewers paid for channel memberships on YouTube in December 2022 – an increase of over 20% from the prior year.

Listening to creators: This year, I’m looking forward to meeting with even more creators in person and hearing how we can support them on YouTube. Creator feedback is a key part of how we develop products, like a feature that lets creators reach new audiences by adding language tracks to their videos. We’re expanding access to this feature to thousands more creators and we’re also testing it in livestreams and Shorts. A livestream event hosted by gaming creator Ludwig last December included audio tracks in English, French, and Spanish, and the stream broke his YouTube channel record for concurrent views.

Growing creator communities: We welcomed top gaming creators fuslie, Sykkuno, LilyPichu, Swagg, Myth, and NexxuzWorld to stream exclusively on YouTube last year. They helped build incredible momentum – we saw more than two trillion gaming related views on our platform in 2022. We've seen how gifted memberships have connected creators with their communities, and this year we’re expanding to mobile. Gaming streams bring lots of highlights and memorable reactions that viewers love to clip. We'll enable viewers to remix clips into Shorts and add features that make it easy to recompose the best of gaming content to Shorts.