We Went to Made On YouTube 2026 (everything you need to know)

0:00This week, we talk about a lot of things, basically all of them YouTube. They had the big Made On event. We get into a lot of the details. I think you're going to dig it. Check it out. Welcome to Creator Upload, your Creator Economy podcast. I'm Lauren Schnipper. And I'm Joshua Cohen. Josh, you left the house. You went to Made On. AI is everywhere. Tell me everything. Lauren, I did leave the house. I got some good vitamin D and it's getting a little brisky here in New York City. Look at you. Yeah, it's some sweater weather. And I went to Made On, which is YouTube's big event where they have all these different product announcements from all these different product teams at the company.

0:33Sure. And I think it's just interesting to take a beat and look at how Maidon started because I love the idiosyncrasies of the trajectory of these types of events at these big companies. So YouTube used to be the keynote sponsor of VidCon. And as part of that keynote, they would be on the main stage. And it was Susan Wojcicki for most of that time when YouTube was VidCon's title sponsor. She would get up on stage and bring up some other engineers, maybe some creators, and talk about all the wonderful things YouTube has created for creators and advertisers and viewers in the last year and what's coming up.

1:09And then YouTube was no longer VidCon's title sponsor. Yes. TikTok took over that role. So YouTube needed this other venue or avenue where it could make all these product announcements from because it didn't have the stage they did before. Well, I think just a little bit more context there. if I may. It's sort of people think and I think it's good to bring up this because people just think like these things have just existed always. And it's absolutely not true. We're all making this up as we go along. And yes, you're right. That happened. Not only did like YouTube see VidCon as the place to sort of make announcements, Facebook was sort of doing that as well and Instagram as well.

1:43They planned their roadmap around like this event to announce things. And then like it got really sort of crowded. And then I think a lot of folks were like, we don't actually have to do that. And like sort of the creator economy got big enough to sort of warrant and justify like its own thing. And to your point, I think that this was bubbling up. And then there's a lot of backstory as to what happened when like TikTok in 2022, I believe it was, took over to be the title sponsor of VidCon. Because YouTube is the title sponsor for years without being super vocal about it. And then they kind of came out loud and proud about it.

2:15And then I think they just assumed that that was always going to be theirs. And then TikTok came swooping in and we have uh it has been well documented on this podcast that i don't think tiktok took a great advantage of being the title sponsor of um vidcon at the time so youtube created this event to make their product announcements and then facebook and instagram have their own it's just like it just started making and then as a consequence started making places like vidcon for lack of a better word a little bit less relevant for those platforms right because they didn't like need to plan their whole years around them so they were like well why are we going to spend all these money at this event when we can just put that into like our own event.

2:53And then here we are, however many years later at the now institutionalized made on event. And at VidCon, we don't control the guest list. We don't control the tech. We have way more control over our own event. It's going to be curated to our exact purposes with our exact audience and more. Let's just do that. This is the same thing that happened with Macworld, which was this huge developers conference and consumer conference for Macintosh computers. and then eventually Steve Jobs was like, why are we doing this? Right. Why are we being part of this third-party event? And then that's how Apple started having their own Mac World Developers Conference.

3:26Oh, okay. Got it. I didn't know about that one. Yeah, totally. It was this third-party event owned by this international data group and it wasn't run by Apple. And eventually the powers that be were like, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? We're big enough that we can handle all of this on our own. We can handle the infrastructure, guest list, and more. And it can be fully curated to our capabilities and there's not another cook in the kitchen. So it's better that way. What happened yesterday, Josh? We want to hear. So that brings us to 2026 made on. It started in 2022. The first one was in LA.

3:56Each subsequent one has been at Pier 57 in New York City, which is this pier that Google owns or at least has rented out for far into the future. And it's this beautiful venue. You can see the New Jersey skyline and the water in the distance. Literally nobody cares about the views. Like what? Like literally. I'm just setting the vibes. I'm just setting the vibes. No, love the vibes. Like, what did they say? Thank you. Getting into what the announcements were about, I think you can position them into three main buckets, which track to the three main constituencies that YouTube has. One is consumer, one is creator, and one is advertising.

4:32Yes. And throughout YouTube's career, throughout YouTube's lifespan, each one of those three groups has sometimes gotten more attention than the others. And I think what's interesting about YouTube now is they're really gelling where it seems a lot more cohesive, where like all three of these constituents are being really built for and thought of in product development along every step of the way. But if we break it down like that, I think I want to start with consumer and I want to start with what I think the biggest announcements were for just general watchers of the platform. So the day kicked off with Neil Mohan getting up on stage to set the stage at where YouTube is at in the ecosystem, talking about how they've invested hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars into making YouTube the premier destination for watching content on televisions in the United States to making YouTube the biggest podcast distribution platform in the world and more.

5:26And there's some stats I want to point out that have been in the ether, but I think are very profound. I haven't heard a lot of, or at least I just was reminded of while I was there. YouTube does a billion hours every single day across the globe on TVs alone. A billion hours a day of YouTube consumption is happening on TVs globally. That's a tremendous amount, but I also like, what's the point of comparison? Like, what is Netflix doing? Netflix doesn't publish the exact same kind of metrics, but globally, there's roughly 536 million hours of content per day watched on Netflix with TVs probably, analysts say, account for about 75 to 80 % of that viewing time.

6:08Okay. So, like, 400 million hours or so. So, like, 40 % of what YouTube's doing. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. so it's a huge number and then also question excuse me is that an engaged view or the vanity view i guess it's ours this is just watch time hours okay sorry yes okay sorry i know there's a lot of metrics floating around it's a totally fair question okay keep going totally fair question i'm glad you brought it up thank you and then as i said just a few moments ago youtube has been the number one most viewed platform on televisions in the united states for the last three years now Also, its ascendancy to that has been a pretty steep trajectory.

6:47So back in July 2023, YouTube accounted for 9.2 % of watch time on television screens. Fast forward to July 2024, it was 10.4%. July 2025, 13.4%. And now in July 2026, it's at 14.2 % of total US television viewing. It's climbing. In three years, it's climbed almost 50 % or so. it's worth noting that july is usually peak consumption because it's when all the kids all over the country are out of school and lauren like your children watching a ton of content the irony is that used to be that like you know back in the day like summer meant kids were like on less screens and just tvs in general and so and here we are anyway moving on and here we are moving on and so those are some of the stats and metrics that i wanted to point out just to show YouTube's like dominance in this ecosystem.

7:37And then the product announcements, the ones I thought I were the most interesting is if we start on TV screens, YouTube is bringing posts over to TV screens. So YouTube lets creators have static images that they post to their channel, kind of so they can have these instances where they're in touch points with their audiences in between when they're uploading actual videos. Those are coming to TV screens. Initially, I was like, kind of who cares. But then Kurt Wilms, who's an engineer at YouTube, I was talking to him afterwards, and he noted that they don't want the television to feel broken from the website.

8:17So YouTube's goal here, and that's why they started having shorts on television. That's why they want posts to be on television now, too, is they don't want you to be able to see anything on YouTube when you're looking at it on a computer screen or on your mobile phone that you can't see on the TV. They So they're bringing posts over the television. I also thought, like, I don't really care about posts, but I don't think this is for us, Lauren. I don't think this is for the kids. I do not think this is for us. Keep going. I think this is for the kids who follow creators and then watch them on televisions and then want to see everything they're up to there.

8:51With that in mind, too, in addition to not having YouTube feel broken, you can now comment through your remote on a YouTube video while you're watching it on TV. I don't know if we needed that. Come on. but again you can comment on your phone keyboard warriors it's going to be remote warriors okay cut to the new types of newfangled remotes they're going to basically be keyboards okay keep going or just like these huge comment threads now so or i can just like talk into my remote yeah stream of consciousness i'm talking about that's what's going to happen okay keep going yes yeah um and then i think this is one of the most interesting announcements of the day they're bringing shows to YouTube Shorts.

9:31Okay. So they brought the shows format to YouTube long form programming where you can go on televisions now and you can watch sequentially like a show from a creator. Creators can organize their playlists into shows. Why are they doing that? Because people are used to watching shows on TV. YouTube wants television advertising dollars and wants people to have a comfortable lean back experience. So they made this shows packaging for YouTube creators to put all their videos that feel like a show together at once so consumers can go through it just like they're watching regular television. So YouTube says it saw over 6.5 billion views on microdrama formats in the first half of 2026.

10:10That watch time is up 50 % year over year. On television specifically, views are up on these microdramas 90 % year over year. And so this is a format that YouTube is seeing a lot of growth in that consumers obviously wanna watch. And they're now giving creators a way to organize these shows in a way that's more, create some more cohesive experience for the viewer. I find that's an interesting category because like I just I feel like all we were doing was talking about micro dramas like six months ago and like a year ago. And I like it's just not I'm not hearing it as much right now. So I have this like I don't know maybe I'm totally wrong but like I feel like it's one of those things that like in a year like we're not going to be talking about micro dramas anymore.

10:49Like I just kind of feel like I don't know. What do you think? I think there was this hype cycle because it was shiny and new and it was something that people haven't seen before. but now I think we're in the kind of like build phase of it. Okay. And then when we start to hear about it, we're going to start to hear about really successful ones or ones that we really liked. And it's not going to be in this category of micro dramas. It's just going to be in like entertainment. Right. It's like, oh, I watch this new show. Yeah. Oh, is it a podcast? Is it a micro drama? Is it a YouTube series? Like is it a television show?

11:18What is it? But like, just like all the specific micro drama studios out there, are they going to still be that thing? Or is it just going to be like a part of a larger thing? Like, I think it's going to be part of a larger thing. it could potentially and i think youtube youtube is showing that it wants it to be part of youtube youtube wants to be this all-encompassing platform for all parts of entertainment now when you started this whole monologue you were talking about how there were three buckets right consumer creator yes brand so like are we still in the consumer part of things right now we're still in the consumer part and let me just tell you one more part for consumers i think is very cool youtube is releasing custom home page feeds okay where you can go in and you can you can type in the type of content you want to see on your homepage.

11:57And then you can just easily click on tabs on the top of your screen to go to different homepages. So you can see curated content for you that's still algorithmically derived. Supposedly, you're going to really like it. YouTube is going to get a lot of watch time. That's great. But you can have different boards on Pinterest, basically, for your YouTube homepage. Yeah. And I know that this is like, I mean, it's a little bit different than what Netflix does, but it's not so different in the sense where like you go on Netflix, like my Netflix homepage probably looks a bit different than yours. But I always, when I see these things like it also, I get a little bit sad about how customized, like I think, yes, there's something great about having something customized so you can watch what you want to watch.

12:37But I also feel like we lose the collective experience of all watching the same thing that we're losing and it's lost and I need to get over it. But like, it's just like I was talking, I was thinking a lot about when Jim Lauderback was on, even talking about creators in general, like when VidCon started, all the kids liked the same three creators, like everybody did. And now those same kids, the young kids have their own specific five creators they like that might be totally different than their best friend. So there's just like, there's no, we're losing so much collective kind of, I mean, entertainment, which is, you know, makes me like the water cooler doesn't really kind of, it's very rare that that exists anymore.

13:15It's not never, but it's rare. no monoculture isn't a thing anymore except in live sports and i think we've seen the ascension some things end up happening like all like off campus like on prime which i will like you know go to bat for like really like really popped like you have these shows that pop um and like like prime specifically is having this moment of these books you know taking these books to series and like kids are really like kids me i love it um so there are some moments but they're sort of viral and you anyway yeah right for instance i've never heard of off campus before but i have heard of the world cup that is a case in point you never listen to me because i've been talking about it for months now so cool go on uh-huh that's for another podcast but i think that's why live sports their distribution deals and agreements yeah that's why dancing with the stars dancing with the stars is huge because it's live like all that stuff anyway go on so i'm getting off track so custom feeds i got that yep so custom home page feeds which i think is going to for better or worse increase the amount of time humans spend on youtube because things are going to be more curated for them they're going to feel like they have a little bit more ownership and control and they're able to find stuff that that's fun for them you can have an unlimited amount of custom home page feeds you can see somebody like they're done with their current home page feed where they're going to go next they're going to go to one of their custom ones they're going to create a new custom one anymore.

14:38Adding on top of that, you can ask YouTube now. And they displayed this during Made On as a way basically to do recon for shopping experiences where like you can type in, hey, I want a camera that can fit in my pocket, that can last for this long in terms of battery life and creates incredible shots and costs less than$200. What are some ideas? And then it'll curate for you kind of like you would in Claude or ChatGPT this basically mini report that's full of YouTube videos. And when you click on the YouTube video, it goes to the exact place in the YouTube video where the person's talking about what you happen to be interested in.

15:16Do you think this is something that creators are going to like or do you think this is going to like, I mean, how can creators, I guess, capitalize on this? Like, I don't know. I think it's a good question because if you think about creators putting all this time, energy and effort into making YouTube videos so that consumers can have this full entertainment experience from end to end saying that, okay, now we're just going to target and pinpoint a place in the YouTube video where consumers can go in and watch, which by the way, YouTube has been doing this for years through Google search. You could Google search for something and it would tell you a place in a YouTube video to watch, but this seems a little bit more upfront and in your face and like it will be adopted a little bit more.

15:52So I get that it can be concerning for creators initially. One, because this is their like craft and they want people to watch the whole thing. And I just wonder if like you're Marques Brown Lee and you do a video on the latest Apple phone, what percentage of your current audience just wants to come in and know like the specific components of one part that they would find in some kind of search like this? And what percentage of your current audience is watching the whole entire thing versus are you going to adopt this new audience that's going to find you because you're going to show up in these kind of search results and then they're going to come and watch you and discover you and subscribe to you and watch a lot of there's also more of your future videos there's also an element of this that's sort of just like i don't necessarily think consumers should be dictating all of this right like consumers don't necessarily know what like they should like what makes good content or what i don't know do you know what i'm saying like i think there's there's a head and heart to all of this.

16:49And so I think these are all great tools for creators to sort of use and decide how they're going to optimize. But ultimately, like, you know, I think the concern is just this sort of like, very generic kind of content that's just going to be like, I mean, this is always the concern with any like product changes that you're just going to like, you know, change it to fit the algorithm. And then we're all it's all the same looking content, blah, blah, blah, you know. And so I think there's a certain element of like, these are cool tools. And by the way, all the platforms when they release these tools, they're then like, OK, go off into the wild and let's see how the consumer creator like uses it.

17:22And like there might there's like there will be things that they announced yesterday that they realize like a are not used at all in the ways that they thought that they were or they're going to be used in a way that's negative or they're not going to be used at all. And people don't like them and all the things, you know, I'm guessing YouTube is going to try to make the case. And hopefully this will be because it will be benefiting everybody that more different types, it's just a new way for consumers to discover individual creators' types of programming. And you want to have as a creator as much surface areas across as many platforms as possible.

17:52And this is just creating more surface area for you. I hope that's how it turns out. All right, Josh, now second bucket, what did they announce for creators? So Lauren, when it comes to creators, YouTube has really made efforts within the past couple of years to provide more than just data and analytics and really help creators with every part of their creative process. from ideation to editing to thumbnails to obviously distribution, which they've always done, community and more. And I think like if you can have a takeaway from what all of these creator announcements are, it's that YouTube is incorporating AI into the platform in many ways to try to give you a team rather than just information.

18:33Oh, I like that. Is that you or is that them, the team versus information? Did you say that? That's me. Was it really? Oh. Thank you. Yeah. I'm good at this sometimes. Sometimes. Go on. So in terms of the information, YouTube is giving you these greater insights and analytics. They will let you in your YouTube studio see what other kinds of videos in your niche are popping off and what other kinds of videos that your audience is watching that are also popular and popping off. It will let you get feedback on draft cuts. So you can upload different cuts of a video and YouTube will provide you with feedback on what it thinks you should do in terms of editing to make that video a little bit better for your audience.

19:23It will generate different types of titles and thumbnails. It will have dynamic thumbnails now. So that's one of the new features where for different audiences can get different thumbnails that YouTube thinks will most appeal to that audience. and this is a huge one video a b testing where you can upload actually two different versions of a video get retention graphs on those videos so you can see which one is doing better than the other and then go live with the one that seems to be more effective there are lots of questions with that and it's like very unclear kind of to what audience that goes out to to how many people it goes out to when the A, B test starts or ends, how different can the videos be if someone's commenting on a video, which version of the video are they're commenting on?

20:11I think there's lots of things to figure out there. But creators are very excited about all of these features, at least the ones I talked to after the event, I'm sure everybody, because it just makes their lives easier. Instead of guessing or sending it around to a bunch of experts, they can stay within the YouTube platform and really use these different types of new features as a focus group for their videos and what's going to perform very well. But how is that like actually a part of their team? So what they were pushing is Ask Studio and this new evolution of Ask Studio. So before you could ask Studio and you could just ask it specific questions and we give you back answers about how your audience was looking like, what your viewership trends are, how much money you're making and more.

20:53But now it can actually get things done on your behalf. So it can help generate these thumbnails. It can run new A-B tests for you. It can optimize your catalog. You can say to it, hey, go back through my back catalog, see which videos aren't performing well. And are there any types of optimizations you can do in terms of new thumbnails or more that could potentially increase viewership on my content library in the past? And this is where it starts getting into the team component, where instead of just providing you with information, it's starting to do stuff for you that can optimize your channel that you would normally otherwise need to have a big team or send off to different people on your team to accomplish.

21:28Okay, Josh. I know there's probably a hundred more things, but is there anything else you want to highlight about updates for creators? On creators, they do also have this natural language editing where you can have a video or multiple videos that you're compiling together for an edit. And you can just type into the editor what you want to happen. And then these agentic AIs will give you back a result that during the demonstrations looked pretty good. It was okay. It was good enough. And I think it can get better or at least to a point where it can take you like 80, 90 percent of the way there.

22:06And then you can finish off the 10 percent on your own. Any other like bells and whistles? Are there any other like sort of nitty gritty stuff like going into like, you know, rights management or anything like that? I think I read something about that. Yes, they did. There were some big announcements of that as well, where YouTube is expanding its likeness protection. We're giving all creators the ability to find their likenesses on the platform. This has been actually there for a while. They've just enhanced some of these capabilities so they can look for deep fakes, be alerted when they happen and then take them down.

22:34They're also now expanding that to voice too. That's huge. Where every creator can basically have their own kind of DRM system or their digital rights management system within YouTube where they get alerted again when their voice is being used on some other types of videos. And then they can figure out what they want to do with that. I think the voice thing is scarier than video because voice is like, if you can do my voice, which we've all established that there's enough of our voices out there that they can do that. That's so much harder to detect than a video, I think. I don't know. It scares me more stealing somebody's voice.

23:10It totally scares me more because it's also less present. Your voice can be over. You wouldn't even realize that your voice was attached to this thing. Correct. I might be like, did I say that? Yeah. Right. And your voice can have way more impact, too. Yes. People recognize people's voices. Yes. So I think it's a lot more, it's a valuable kind of safety measure that YouTube's implementing here. It's unclear whether it's going to have the same kind of levers as YouTube's content management system where like rights holders can choose to monetize other videos that are using their footage. I don't know if that's going to happen or not.

23:41It would be kind of interesting to see if YouTube did it that way. But at least right now you can get alerted and you can elect presumably to like, keep it up, take it down or do something else with it. Okay, last bucket. Give me one update for advertisers. Yes, in terms of advertisers, I think out of the three constituencies that YouTube has here, this wasn't the event for advertisers. This was the event for creators and viewers and more aligned to those different types of products and engineering teams. The advertising engineering team just had their big moment a few months ago with YouTube Brandcast and the digital content new fronts for Google.

24:19So they were just basically reminding everybody here that YouTube is committed to and very engaged in providing creators with as many opportunities as possible to get brand deals. And that is through the newfangled YouTube creator partnerships, which has lots of new APIs for influencer marketing agencies and lots of more ways for brands to easily connect with creators. It did tell the couple stats, including there's a 60 % growth in brand deal shorts in 2025. And brand deals grew double digits year over year across every creator size with the creators in the 10 ,000 to 100 ,000 channels growing the fastest.

24:56this. So YouTube is really also trying to like help this kind of middle tier of creators. And I think that's also kind of what's appealing to lots of advertisers who are just getting into the mix. There's a bunch of shiny objects at the top. There's a bunch of micro influencers at the bottom. But there's a lot of creators in the middle that can be appealing for advertisers. And YouTube is trying to facilitate these deals. Amazing. All right, Josh, thank you for going on the road for us. Really appreciate that. I feel like I know there's so much more we can focus on. We got to get to uploads and downloads, Josh.

25:26I'm going to do my first one. It's talking about Mr. Beast, Jimmy Donaldson. He and James Patterson did a collab. As we reported before, Mr. Beast and James Patterson, who's like a humongous author, as we've written like 300 books, collaborated on a book called The Most Dangerous Games. And part of this, you know, in true Mr. Beast style, there is an opportunity for readers who have a valid proof of purchase in this country to win a million dollars, Josh. But that's not the upload or download. The semi-download is, even though this is, you know, landed on the number three on the New York Times bestseller list, et cetera, it's only sold about 22 ,000 copies of this book, which in Mr.