I Asked YouTube's CEO Your Hardest Questions (feat MrBeast, Logan Paul & Cleo Abram)

0:00I talked to about 80 creators for this interview. How's it going, Neil? I got a fun one for you. Hey, Neil. It's been a wild couple years for YouTube. What's up, Neil? Logan here. Oh, man. I want to ask you their toughest questions. We are the world's first and largest creator economy, and I intend to make sure that we remain that way. I had a first look at these new features that YouTube is about to launch. I just prompted a video about LaBuboos. I deepfaked myself. Honestly, Neil, I feel guilty about that video. I don't think a piece of content should be penalized just because it was created with AI.

0:35I pulled these videos from different eras of YouTube, 2010, 2015, 2025, from now Mr. Beast spending millions on their videos. I've been through all these eras. If I'm being honest, I had to take out a lot of my savings to start my YouTube channel. And I talked to creators who have taken up to$60 ,000 in loans to start their channels. I'm wondering, what is YouTube actually doing to help smaller creators grow?

1:06Um, all right, make sure you subscribe and ring the bell because we have so many big videos coming up from interviews to studio tours. And if you haven't already, then go to yt hack pack.com to get our free YouTube hack pack with all our best tips, tools, and templates to grow on YouTube today from our intro and thumbnail templates to our 100 viral ideas for any niche. We constantly updated as we interview more creators. so you have the latest and greatest for free. All right, now back to the video. It's crazy being back here at YouTube. You know, when I left my job here seven years ago to disappoint my parents and try to make YouTube videos full-time, I never thought I'd be getting a chance to interview you as CEO on our channel as YouTube makes some of the biggest updates in the platform's history.

1:47So thank you for having me. Yeah, no, thank you for being here, John. Are your parents happy now with what you're doing? Yeah, yeah, we're making them work. Proved them wrong. We got a two-year-old now. Awesome, congrats. Thank you. So this interview took about a year to schedule. You're a busy guy. I apologize. No, no, no, no. We made it happen. We made it happen. We're excited. But during that time, I had a chance to prep by talking to about 80 to 90 YouTubers. Oh, wow. Of all different subscriber sizes. You did your homework. I did. And they submitted questions, some of them in video, some of them in text, some of them on our Discord.

2:16And by far, the number one question that we got is, what is YouTube actually doing to help smaller creators grow? And we got this question from creators as small as Cielo skin with 4k subscribers and as big as this guy who texted me a question that I wanted to start off and play for you. Oh, all right. Well, I know this guy. So let's see what he has to say. How's it going, Neil? I got a fun one for you. So obviously I spend millions of dollars a video. I have hundreds of employees, you know, largest YouTube channel in the world. But I'm curious, what are you doing to help the next me, the next Mr.

2:52Beast? Is there anything in these updates that will help smaller creators succeed? Because the platform isn't just big creators like me. It also thrives as long as people think that they can start a new YouTube channel and have to make good enough videos, build a career off of it. Awesome. Well, it's great. I'd expect nothing less from Jimmy. By the way, actually, what I love about it is like this is one of our most largest and most successful creators. And what he's focused on is the next generation of creators and really paying it forward. And I just love that about the culture at YouTube. Right.

3:23Like that is such a part of the creator ethos here. And, you know, ultimately for someone uploading a creative idea to YouTube for the first time, what really matters is getting eyeballs on it and people to watch it. And so, of course, as you know, a lot of how our recommendation systems work is it's about putting videos, recommendations in front of you that you want to watch. But we do reserve some inventory in those recommendations for the discovery of new creators. Neil, to be clear on that one, because I feel like I'm seeing more videos on my homepage. I took a bunch of screenshots from creators that only have a few thousand subscribers and these videos have a few hundred views.

3:57So I'm wondering, is there something going on with the algorithm now that's different where YouTube is trying to surface some of these smaller videos? Like, is YouTube reserving slots on my homepage for these videos that don't have a ton of views? You're showing me, you know, a bunch of VODs, long-form content. The same thing applies in shorts. This notion of actually having new creators get discovered. I think it's really important. In fact, it's so important within YouTube that we try to track as much as we can this notion of creators getting started. And what I mean by that is not getting started in the literal sense of like setting up a channel and uploading a video.

4:38Of course, that's important. We want that to be a seamless process. But getting started in more of the real sense of like feeling like they're a YouTuber, getting some success, getting a handful of subscribers, getting some watch time, et cetera. So we look at that just as closely, if not even more closely, than the health of our biggest creators. What else is YouTube doing to help new creators? Because there's a lot of people out there who claim that YouTube has a creator problem, where creators like Jack's film said YouTube is an oversaturated platform that tends to boost already popular content and successful channels, and it's getting harder to break through.

5:15What would you say to a creator like that or people who are making videos like that in 2025? five. There's a lot of other things that also were also focused on there. So one of the ones that I'm most excited about, actually, you may have seen recently, speaking of Jimmy, as a collaboration between Mr. Beast and Mark Rober for Team Water, is a formal collaboration feature where if you're a creator, let's say you're a large creator, you can collaborate with up to a total of five creators to bring their channels along, to introduce your audience to their channels. And so So that's another thing that we're very excited about, hype you're aware of, which is where fans can actually hype up their favorite up-and-coming creators.

5:58So I could go on and on in terms of features and ideas that we're working on for the next generation of creators, new creators, creators just getting started, above and beyond what we're doing and recommendations. Yeah, I have a lot of questions about that. For the collab feature, I was most interested in what that meant for smaller creators. And I actually reached out to two smaller creators, Stix and Jack Gordon, who did a collab video with Mark Rober for Team Water. And I asked them if they could screenshot their YouTube studio metrics for those videos. One of them had a 132x outlier on their video and the other one had a 21x outlier, respectively, which was crazy to see.

6:36In talking to your product teams, my understanding is that before, if you had somebody in your video or on your podcast, it would take some time to gather signal and put it in front of their audience to see if they like it. But now it immediately sends your video in front of their audience if they accept your collab request. And even like I just realized you could do the collab feature retroactively. So in the past week, I got access to it. And I went back through my podcast and invited Jimmy to be a collab author on my podcast, which I think may be the first podcast to have that feature. And I saw spike in views so i think it's interesting i think it's also a relationship game where not a lot of like smaller careers may know uh these creators but anybody could collab at any level um so it is interesting yeah i think it's and you're right like it is some of it is a relationship game obviously you know lots of these creators it's easy for you to reach out to them uh for up-and-coming creators i can imagine that being harder but now the functionality actually exists where uh if that larger creator is receptive, they actually have a product that they can use to do this.

7:43And even if you're a smaller creator, you can collab with other creators of your size to get in front of their audiences so you could grow even faster. So a lot of interesting ways to use the tool as it rolls out. It's really early days, as you know, like the product is not widely available, but it's one that I'm super, super excited about. It's one that, you know, again, back to this ethos of our creators, large creators have asked about just as much as up-and-coming creators because they know it's a way for them to pay it forward as well. Yeah. Who keeps the money when you do a collab? The creator who started the collab.

8:17So one creator does. So I think in the case of Jimmy and Mark, I think it was kind of the home channel, if you will, was Jimmy's channel. And so that's where the monetization goes. But as you know, for young creators, I mean, for up-and-coming creators, it's not just about the money. It's oftentimes really about the audience, as you point out in your research there. Do you see a future where the collab feature could allow you to split revenue between creators? I think it's really early days. Actually, honestly, and that might be the case at some point, but both the asks for this feature and the feedback on it has really been around audience and engagement.

8:57It's back to this kind of I have something interesting. I really want to share it with as wide of an audience as possible, and that's That's what the ask has been. It's really bad audience building. Yeah. And you could also share analytics on the tool. You can share analytics. You can. So, yeah, that has been a key part of it. The other thing that I should mention that's super important around it, your question on monetization reminded me, we're giving lots of creator examples, especially up-and-coming creators, new creators. But it's also something that can work for brands. Brands as creators as well.

9:33So, you know, if you're a creator like John, you can collaborate like you did with Jimmy, but you can also collaborate with a brand or a sponsor as well. And so that's another use case that I'm super excited about. And another update I saw is that YouTube is working on autodubbing your videos with multiple audio tracks. But also I saw that you guys are working on reanimating a creator's lips. So it sounds like they're speaking the foreign language more naturally, even if they don't know it. In the Pro variants, there is a huge news about the things that have really changed. First of all, the camera department.

10:08There have been some interesting upgrades. Yeah, I think multitrack audio is going to be one that is not just the purview of large creators, but for up-and-coming creators as well, because it turns out that one of the biggest barriers to growth, if the algorithm is efficient, is actually language. I pulled these videos from different eras of YouTube from 2010, 2015, 2025. Nice. And seeing like the double rainbow era, like the annoying orange to the Tyler Oakley and Bethany Moda era of people vlogging their rooms to now, you know, Mark Rober, Michelle Carey, Mr. Beast, like spending like millions on their videos.

10:47and I know YouTube has paid over$70 billion to creators in the past three years, which is far more than any other digital platform. But especially as I talk to a lot of creators, like Neil, if I'm being honest, I had to take out a lot of my savings to start my YouTube channel after I left my corporate jobs. And I talked to creators like Matthew Beam, who took$60 ,000 in loans to start his YouTube channel. And he's made it now. He has over 5 million subscribers. But there's a lot of creators who don't. And I'm wondering, what is YouTube doing to help these creators earn more and build bigger businesses to keep up with the content quality bar that keeps rising?

11:27The way I think about it is that we are the world's first and largest creator economy. And I intend to make sure that we remain that way. We've paid out billions and billions of dollars to the creator ecosystem over the last several years. And we want that to continue to grow. And so first and foremost, it's continuing to make sure that what creators can earn from ads is something that grows with their success. And what that means is you have to deliver high-quality advertising products to advertisers and brands. And so that's an area that we don't actually talk a lot about much because it's not as much creator facing, but it's an enormous amount of our resources going to making it so that the ad products that advertisers are spending billions of dollars on actually works for them.

12:15And of course, that translates into revenue for creators. And so that's first and foremost. It's the least talked about, but it's the most important. And then it's making sure that creators can earn revenue not just from ads but also from brand deals for creators, especially some of our larger creators who I know generate a lot of their revenue outside of YouTube ads and through brand deals. So we're very focused on that last piece. Yeah. Tell me about what's new when it comes to helping creators get brand deals. Because I had a first look at these new features that YouTube is about to launch.

12:49And one of the ones that I think is going to change the way creators go about sponsorships is dynamic ad placements. Can you tell me about that change and what's coming to YouTube? Yeah. So that's a feature I'm also very excited about. And so, you know, as you know, and, you know, we see this in our own sort of watching experience, creators, especially larger creators, are increasingly working with different brands, different products, different retailers. And those sort of sponsored moments, that video segment is often burned into their videos. They record it basically alongside the videos that they're uploading to YouTube.

13:27Well, what if you could make that dynamic? What if you could actually specify within your video where the best place is to actually insert those placements and make it so that you can swap those out maybe a year down the road, maybe two years down the road, maybe within a week or what have you, depending on what your business objectives are, the deals that you have with your sponsors. That makes that inventory within that video much more valuable because it delivers better ROI for the brands. And so dynamic brand moments is something I'm very excited about. That's not the only feature, though, that we're doing for brands.

14:04Just to take a moment on that, because I think that's a big deal. And again, it's going to change a lot of the ways that creators go about working with brands. I was trying to make sense of it because right now you kind of almost have these three different ads. You have auto mid-rolls, where the algorithm essentially decides that you could place ads that the Google Ads team has sourced and places in. And you could change those around. like those are kind of status quo. The other thing that we have right now are these burnt-in sponsorships, as you said, like a creator speaks to camera as part of the video and that's there.

14:36And unless you trim it out, it stays within the video. This new feature is gonna allow you to put something in in a given timestamp. And then let's say you have a deal with a sponsor and say, I'm gonna deliver you 1 million impressions. Once that is met, you could then take that out of the video and go sell that spot to another sponsor. Or if I want to swap in a new brand read because I did a holiday campaign for a sponsor and now the holiday's over and I want to swap in something more evergreen for them, I can now do that too with this new feature. Is that right? That's exactly right, yes. And if I want, I'm just thinking like big here, if I want to sell that ad placement geographically, Will there be a capability to do that too?

15:26Like send one sponsorship for all U.S. viewers, show another sponsorship. Eventually we'd like to get to that. And by the way - To Mexico, et cetera. That's how our ad systems work today. So actually what you're describing is, it's interesting, the line between traditional media advertising and brand sponsorships is a bit of a blurry line. And actually a lot of it depends on what you as the creator have negotiated or what terms you've come to with the brand that you're working with. And so that could be a delineation. Right now, it's really more around sort of like you as a creator, how you're thinking about it sort of over time.

16:04But we want to build more functionality there as well. But that's, again, that's one feature that I'm very excited about. And that has been a big ask. Creators have asked me for that. Another one that creators talk to me about pretty regularly is shorts. is a great place for brands and creators to collaborate. And so one of the things that we're very excited about is actually allowing in YouTube Shorts for the first time the ability to actually link to the brands from the Shorts. And so, again, something that I think will be valuable to users but also valuable to creators because they're now making their partnership even more valuable to the brand.

16:49So it's like one of those sort of trifecta-type features that I think can work for fans, creators, and brands all at once. So that's another, back to your original question of like, what are we doing to enhance monetization? That's another feature that I'm excited about. So you get a link to the brand's landing page or like, because I know previously you guys had taken away LinkedIn Shorts. Yeah, so this is actually a brand new feature that's literally about this brand sponsorship's use case within the Shorts feed. Yeah, amazing. What are you doing for creators who want to work with a brand? they may talk about them organically, but they can't get in touch with them.

17:25Like, yeah, what are you doing for those smaller creators? Yeah, I think that's super important too because brands sometimes, especially large brands, they want to work with many creators at once. And so we're also, the third thing that we're building that I'm excited about is something called Creator Partnerships Hub. And it's kind of actually the way you just described it, John, which is like it's a marketplace that brings creators and brands together because you're right, like small creators in particular might have amazing content that can work for various brands, but they don't really know how to reach out to them.

18:01But actually, believe it or not, it goes in the other direction as well. Brands are also looking to work with, obviously, the amazing large creators that exist on YouTube, but they're also looking to work with upcoming creators, many creators who have amazing content, but they may have not heard about. So this is a place to kind of bring both those sides together. And I guess what's new as well is there's a lot of marketplaces out there right now, a lot of third-party ones that try to match brands and creators. This one that YouTube is putting out is one where it'll take some of the videos that are already organically made by creators.

18:34Like let's say you want to work with Nike. You're making videos where you're giving Nike a shout-out organically. Through this portal, Nike would then start to see these videos. And then there could be a message or outreach like trying to make that happen. You can decide, yeah, this works. This is super interesting. I want to collaborate and connect through this hub. Wow. After a creator makes a video without even having a relationship, having a contact at the brand. Correct. Interesting. One of the other big changes, actually, which I think is very important in terms of our support for up-and-coming creators, is something that we actually did a couple years ago now.

19:10It harkens back to our very first made on YouTube, which is create a new tier for monetization. So there was always the YPP tier around ads monetization, you know, thousand subs, you know, kind of that sort of tier. We've expanded it, as you know, since then and introduced a tier where you are eligible for a lot of our fan funding features at a lower threshold. And so expanding both tools to help up-and-coming creators get discovered, but also helping them monetize. Yeah. Another huge topic that a lot of creators have asked about is AI and how will that impact our monetization, the discovery of our videos, especially as there's some studios and faceless channels out there that make a ton of AI-generated content.

19:59And obviously that competes for the same digital real estate that our human content does. and I know as part of this launch, YouTube is actually launching a ton of new AI tools. One, I saw a first look of where you could turn your speech into a song. I saw this tool that you guys are launching where it takes a bunch of videos from your camera roll and turns it into a full-fledged short like a recipe tutorial. This other one that inserts a photo of you into a dance video so you could partake in a trend and I know Google has VO3 and I get the validity behind them. I like it. For a newer creator, like that makes it easier to upload kind of like a filter did back in the day for a photo.

20:34And we're just in the first inning of all this. And there's a ton of AI slop out there as well. And so knowing all this, I wanted to tee up a question from none other than Logan Paul and get your thoughts. Okay. What's up, Neil? Logan here. I'm curious what type of AI content will be eligible for monetization on YouTube and not get dinged in the algorithm. I think a lot of AI studios are going to be popping up here as it becomes more and more prominent. And I'm wondering how YouTube is going to handle it because I think there's a misconception at the moment with how much work goes into some of the high quality top tier AI content that's being made.

21:16And people just don't know about it. And some of it's generated fully. Some of it's half generated and mixed in with traditional media techniques. And so I'm just curious how YouTube is going to be handling this AI revolution because I think it's going to be really prominent and a lot of content will be generated. Yeah. Oh, man, this is a super interesting question. And I think even the way Logan framed it is actually sort of the right way to frame it, which is what I would say first and foremost is I don't think our systems, whether it's, you know, the algorithm that Logan's alluding to or monetization or what have you, should honestly discriminate one way or the other.

21:58whether something was generated via AI, like VO or something like that, or done with a traditional sort of camera or some combination. Just like new video editing tools are invented all the time, new ways to modify your video are being invented all the time, I really view all of these AI tools that we're creating as exactly that, tools. They should enable creative people like yourself, like Logan, like others, to do what they do best, which is produce amazing content for their audiences. And so that's the first thing that I will say. And I think that that applies to our discovery algorithms. It applies to monetization.

22:43Having said that, I also recognize that with AI tools, the cost of production can go down dramatically if you're just in the business of trying to produce like a giant quantity of content and sort of put it out there to see what happens, like that has now become dramatically easier. So I think it is incumbent on how YouTube works to make sure that we are not, you know, that users don't get flooded with, you know, quote unquote sort of low quality content or what have you. You know, just like we worked really hard to eliminate the clickbait problem that used to exist, years and years ago in the thumbnails and really focus on things like sort of long-term satisfaction on YouTube.

23:32That's the way that I think about approaching it, both in terms of discovery of this type of content, but also in terms of monetization. So no a priori ding or sort of prejudice around it, but recognizing that these tools might result in some of that type of content being produced and making sure that our systems are capable and robust enough to be able to deal with them. That's how I think about it. We also have a lot of community guidelines already in place where if you're a creator that is uploading fully synthetic content, you should indicate that in the upload. And then we place that sort of label sometimes on the video itself, but oftentimes just in the metadata.

24:12Again, just as a service to all of your fans and users so that they can recognize that, yeah, this was produced in this particular fashion. And by the way, every piece of content on YouTube, whether it's produced, you know, kind of with a camera, with AI tools, with some combination, is also, of course, subject to our community guidelines around, you know, deceptive practices and all that sort of stuff as well. I wanted to make this really specific by putting this on a spectrum of fully human to fully AI. And these are videos that I've seen or I've made. So this one is one that I spent hundreds of dollars editing, my own camera, my own face, everything, fully human.

24:51This one is one where I prompted the idea from AI. There's a lot of tools out there. It gave me an idea. I started talking. I prompted the script, tweaked it, partially AI. This one is like I just prompted a video about Labubus, which I know nothing about. And I deepfaked myself. But now you're an expert. Honestly, Neil, I feel guilty about that video because here's me talking about Labubus and all these amazing graphics. And this cost a fraction of the price. We use this tool called Agent Opus from Opus Club. And then on the other side of the spectrum, this is from a channel that has over 1 million subscribers.

25:30This video has about 30 million subscribers. There's no face. It's a ton of content on their channel that's very much like this AI kitten kind of going about their day. I'm just wondering, what's the difference in monetization discovery between these types of videos? Yeah. What do you think the difference should be? I think it's a big question, but I think this one uses my name, image, and likeness. And there should be parameters where if it's deepfaked by somebody else, then there should be a content ID that clamps down on that. So the topic, I don't know. I'm curious to hear your take. But this one is the thing I feel really weird about.