Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Neal Mohan first encountered YouTube almost two decades ago in a tiny office above a pizzeria in San Mateo when he worked for DoubleClick, an advertising platform trying to help the founders of the streaming service make money.Within two years, both Californian start-ups had been bought by Google, for $1.65bn and $3.1bn respectively, bringing Mohan to the search giant to turbocharge its advertising business as it diversified into video.YouTube now generates $50bn of annualised revenue for Alphabet, Google’s parent company. It has developed from hosting amateur clips to a hub for music streaming, cable TV subscriptions, live sports and a lucrative profit-sharing platform for so called “creators” — such as online influencers — and their hundreds of millions of Gen Z fans.“I’m really bullish on the future of YouTube. We’re still in the first or second inning,” Mohan said in an interview at its San Bruno headquarters, 15 minutes north from where YouTube was founded. “We haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg in what we’ll be able to do with technologies like generative AI.”YouTube is an increasingly vital business line as Google’s core search and advertising divisions face threats from antitrust lawsuits and as artificial intelligence rivals chip away at its dominance of mobile and desktop search.After declining for much of 2023, YouTube’s advertising income has bounced back, growing 15 per cent to $25.7bn in the first nine months of 2024. While this is a fifth of the $144bn brought in by search-linked ads revenue, Alphabet needs the cash. It has ramped up spending to $38.3bn as it races Microsoft and Amazon to build data centres and develop chips to power its AI ambitions.Mohan, 51, named chief executive in 2023 after five years as chief product officer, is launching a suite of AI-infused products to drive the next leg of YouTube’s growth. He faces a tricky balancing act between giving users new AI tools like create near-instant video and music, without causing creators to revolt in fear of being supplanted.Mohan is at pains to stress the importance of creators to its new strategy, having already paid out $70bn in subscription and advertising revenue to partners in the past three years.He flagged two experimental features developed by DeepMind, Google’s AI unit, called Dream Screen and Dream Track, which “synthetically generate beautiful videos and music from text”.“AI has to be in service of human creativity,” said Mohan. “They are tools in the hands of creators. They are never meant to replace them. That is the ethos.” Another DeepMind feature Mohan highlighted is auto dubbing, which automatically translates English language videos into eight other languages and vice versa. “Creators who have these massive audiences, what’s the barrier to their growth? Language,” he said. “That’s a problem that AI can solve, it will seamlessly exist within YouTube . . . That’s how our creators expect AI to be used on their behalf.”The Trump conundrum Another issue for Mohan to navigate is the wrath of president-elect Donald Trump. He was banned from the platform for two years in 2021 after Google deemed he incited violence at the January 6 Capitol riot.Trump and his newfound allies in Silicon Valley have accused social networks of left-leaning censorship, preferring the free-speech absolutism championed by Elon Musk on X.Marc Andreessen, the billionaire venture capitalist who is helping Musk to advise Trump, has called for internal Google data to be released in a similar fashion to the so-called “Twitter files”, which allegedly revealed an anti-conservative bias in moderation decisions.“We should get the YouTube files and we probably will,” said Andreessen on a podcast with Joe Rogan. “This new administration is going to carve all this stuff open.”Mohan said: “We’ve already worked with Trump for four years in a very productive way through a lot of challenging times . . . in a way where free speech and broad views were preserved. We really do remain a bastion of free speech . . . But, just because it’s an open platform, it doesn’t mean that anything goes.”Mohan said he has led a “very, very heavy” investment in AI and human moderation and strengthened community guidelines since a “crucible moment” in 2017, when advertisers boycotted YouTube after a series of scandals about hate speech videos being uploaded and concern over paedophiles and terrorists infiltrating comment sections.While YouTube is most associated with laptop and mobile videos, its fastest-growing segment is connected TVs, on which 1bn hours of content is streamed daily. It is not just a popular medium to watch sports and series, but also creator-made “shorts”, its TikTok competitor that the company says gets 70bn views a day.Ampere Analysis ranks YouTube as third-biggest spender on original content behind only Disney and Comcast, investing more than $20bn in the first half of 2024, surpassing Netflix and Warner Bros Discovery.“YouTube’s advertising revenue alone, forecasted at $35bn in 2024, exceeds Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video’s total earnings and falls just shy of Netflix’s total revenue,” according to an Ampere report.Its biggest bet so far has been a seven-year, $14bn deal to broadcast US National Football League matches, part of the reason why 35bn hours of sports content was watched on YouTube last year. Mohan is open to buying more rights arrangements, but the steep cost means that each needs to be “evaluate[d] on its own merits.”CEO ambitions? Born in Indiana, Michigan, Mohan moved to Lucknow in India for high school, before returning to the US to study electrical engineering at Stanford university. After joining Google in 2007 as part of the DoubleClick deal, he became a protégé of top executive Susan Wojcicki and helped build its ad tech business, which matches advertisers and publishers in instant algorithmically driven online auctions. It has been so successful that the Department of Justice is seeking to break it up for being a monopoly.He succeeded Wojcicki at YouTube in 2023. She died of lung cancer in August.Mohan has had many offers from rivals during his 17-year tenure. He was dubbed Google’s “$100mn man” after reportedly receiving a retention package of stock grants in 2013 when he was being courted by Twitter. “Don’t believe everything you read out there,” said Mohan about his pay. Asked if he eventually wanted the top job at Alphabet, the YouTube chief sidestepped the question. “I’ve been at Google a very long time. I do really enjoy the people that I work with,” he said. “We’re still in the early days of where AI will take us — if we were having this conversation two years ago, 80 per cent of what we talked about would just be a theoretical idea . . . it keeps things really, really exciting.”
