We Predict the Future of YouTube

0:00The Colin and Samir Show is supported by Microsoft Copilot. This is something I thought I would never say, but can I share with you my favorite prompt? I mean, like when you say something like that, I have to say yes. Were you going to say no? No, but okay. Just let me hear it. So when I'm researching for a guest or I need to know a lot about a subject matter, I say, make me a podcast about. And when you do that, you're going to get a short blurb about that subject. And then in like two minutes, you're going to get a podcast. So check this out. Welcome to Co-Pilot Podcasts. Picture this, a guy working the front desk at a hotel, making lacrosse videos in his spare time, completely unaware that he's about to become one of the most influential voices in the creator economy.

0:38Today, we're diving into the remarkable story of Colin Rosenblum. Wow. Did you pay it to say that? That's crazy. That's very kind. It's crazy, but it's my favorite way to learn about a subject matter. I'm learning about so much more now that I can turn this research into like a seven minute podcast that I can listen to just when I'm walking. Did you tell it that I worked at the front desk of a hotel? Dude, the prompt is just make me a podcast about Colin from Colin and Samir. That's it. I may be biased, but I'm on the edge of my seat. I'm hooked. So if you guys haven't checked out Copilot, check it out.

1:10Try it for your research. Try it for getting variations of your titles, your ideas. It's one of my favorite tools on the internet right now for our creativity. And now back to the show. What does YouTube look like in 2050? Well, we spent the last two weeks with the CEO of YouTube, some of the most innovative creators, and Mark Zuckerberg. Now, all these experiences gave us a glimpse into what the future will look like. And weirdly, meeting Mark Zuckerberg actually taught us a lot about what YouTube will look like. So throughout this episode, we'll talk about how YouTube will change over the next year, and then how it'll change over the next 25 years.

1:46And to fully bring that 2050 vision to life throughout the episode, we're going to be showing you futuristic mock-ups of YouTube that we made in collaboration with an incredible creator named Concept Central. Now we're also going to be talking about the tech that we've tried firsthand, the insights we've learned, and the actions that you can take to future-proof your YouTube channel. You want to know something else futuristic on? Okay. The way we generated the thumbnails for this video. Yeah. And even the idea. It was pretty wild. Yeah. Both of those came from the sponsor of this episode, Spotter Studio.

2:16Spotter Studio is an AI-powered brainstorm partner specifically designed for YouTube creators. Now, if you're a YouTube creator, I can't emphasize this enough. you should definitely try this out. It helps you brainstorm new ideas for your channel based on your top performing videos, as well as the top performing videos on YouTube. And the software continues to get upgraded. Already since the last time we told you about Spotter Studio, there is now a new thumbnail style called Realistic, which truly helps. We can now look at way more realistic mock-up versions of potential thumbnails. These thumbnail mock-ups give us the confidence to move forward with producing a video and also give us the idea of how to shoot and design our thumbnails.

2:58Now with Spotter Studio, you can start from scratch just by pressing brainstorm and it'll give you ideas or you can type in an idea to workshop. It's the best software to support you with your YouTube channel. So if you want to give it a try, we have a 60 day free trial that's linked in our description. Check that out, connect your YouTube channel and start brainstorming. All right, YouTube in 2050. Let's get into it. I wish you could hear the sounds that these just made. Yeah, that's basically what they made. Yeah, I heard it.

3:31All right, so here's how we're going to structure this episode. We are going to talk about three actual things that we learned over the past three weeks from being both at YouTube as well as Meta, and how those inform what we think YouTube could look like in 2050. Where does this story begin? All right, so this story begins in New York City at Made on YouTube. Made on YouTube is the event where YouTube announces all their newest features. They bring a bunch of creators together in a room, and we get to hear from the CEO, Neil Mahon, firsthand about the priorities of YouTube and where they are headed.

4:05Sitting there in the seats, the one thing that struck me the most was cinematic channel pages and episodic view. So this is the way that YouTube shows up on your TV screen. They are now formatting it for big screens so that it looks very similar to Netflix. Yeah. Eerily similar to Netflix. Right. You know? So this is something that's coming in the very near future for YouTube. Like this is like a next year thing, 2025 thing. I think one of the major things about this in terms of why it's futuristic, it's going to push the culture of how YouTube content is created. Our good friend and member of the content closet, Tejas Halor, just made a series about attractiveness, the science of attractiveness.

4:53And he spent six months on this series. The trailer that he dropped, which he even dropped a trailer, which is like not really that YouTube. You would assume you drop a trailer maybe on Instagram or X or something like that. He drops a trailer. The thumbnail intentionally looks like Netflix. Yeah. Right? And it's playing out episode to episode. On his channel banner right now, it says episode two loading. Right. Right. And it feels like something that could be on a streamer. Now, Tejas is a creator with 80 ,000 subscribers. That's very hard to do what he's doing. And it's not going to be something that I think, you know, anyone and everyone on YouTube can do.

5:30I think in the future, YouTube for new people is like, you start out making shorts, most likely. But it's going to be hard to stand out. So if we extrapolate that out and go further, new creator discovery gets really hard, in my opinion. Because if you look at your own behavior of like opening the YouTube app on a TV, you're not really navigating to like a brand new piece of content. Yeah. And there's more at stake as a smaller creator if you put all the time, energy, and resources into making something that could be on television that takes six months to make. Right. We went through this firsthand.

6:02We tried to make really intricate docu-series and video essays on our channel four or five years ago. And when it didn't go well, it really… Stinks. hurt our egos, but also felt like a waste of time. It was discouraging. And that's where I think hype their new leaderboard for smaller creators between, I think, 50 ,000 and 500 ,000 subscribers comes in where you can ask your audience to hype you or other creators can encourage people to hype a smaller creator and they'll show up on a leaderboard. And I think that exists because it is harder for smaller creators who are making things that aren't necessarily like algorithmically valuable right away to stand out.

6:48First of all, with hype, like I think it's a great idea. I think everyone wants it. I think it's a short-term solution. There has to be a mechanism to discover brand new creators. Because if not, as we look in the future of YouTube, it's going to get like a platform that had a low, relatively low barrier to entry when it first started. the barrier to entry is increasing. If you have to make TV quality style content that has multi-episodic and is able to be binged, if that's like the gold standard of YouTube, how does a new creator break through? If we play that out now, 20 plus years. You've got hype, right?

7:25Which is like this next version of a leaderboard for smaller creators. If you keep going down that trend, are there just going to be more and more leaderboards per different types of genre. Here's a leaderboard for scripted content on YouTube. Here's a leaderboard for cooking channels. Tell you what, the YouTube studio with the one out of 10 ranking, as much as I don't like it sometimes because it gamifies what we do and makes me feel bad, it also sort of motivates me and makes me understand how to track if I'm doing well. And I think a leaderboard also supports that. I'm like, oh, you know what?

8:01I'm the number two or I'm the number one channel in my category this month. They have that in music. It's all about like top country charts, top this chart. Yeah, that's true. No, that's good. I like that. Could happen. That's good. Now, YouTube also announced a lot of AI stuff, right? Like AI getting integrated into your workflow, AI getting integrated into dubbing, right? Like so that basically AI will automatically dub your content into other languages. That's really interesting. I think that will culturally change what YouTube content looks like because that means people who make universal concepts as videos that can be understood across borders and languages will be the most mass viewership videos.

8:4680 % of the world doesn't speak English. So there's a huge opportunity to have creators who are like global phenomenon. But what I think dubbing shows us is a glimpse into the maybe more distant future where yes you have like an AI version of your voice that you can use as a creator as a tool but we're also going to have AI video versions of ourselves that I think we can use as tools so when we went to Meta Connect which is Meta's basically version of like made on YouTube where they announced all of their new features. Zuck was on stage with a creator named Don Allen. And Alan Stevenson, the third.

9:31Yeah, he's got a long name. I abbreviated that. So he's on stage with him, but he is essentially FaceTiming the AI video version of him. And Zuck is having a conversation with the AI avatar version of Don Allen. Grats on the new book that you just released. What's the main thing that you're hoping that people take away from it? Thank you so much. Yeah. The main thing I want people to take away from my book is... And yeah, it takes a little bit of time for the AI version of Don Allen to get his thoughts together and respond. And it does sound a little AI-y. But what is this world we're living in where you and I can have AI versions of ourselves as like a filmmaking tool?

10:16Yeah, like imagine a YouTube backend where I am typing in or I'm using voice to workshop or write a script. And then I generate the video and the video that's generated is in our set. And it looks basically indistinguishable and sounds indistinguishable from if I actually were to film it. Is that a tool you would use as a consumer or as a creator? Let's start with as a creator. Would you use that tool? Well, I actually, I asked that question because I would use it if consumers liked it. And I think I have to answer that question first as a consumer. Like, let's say you're watching a Johnny Harris video.

10:59Yeah. And it says made with AI somewhere under it. And you don't know what part of it is made with AI, but it turns out actually the video of Johnny explaining something is an AI avatar version of him, but he's in his set. It looks like him. It sounds like him. And you can't tell. But it says made with AI in the corner. Yeah. Do you care? No, we don't. Not really. Yeah. And Johnny, if he's like in Hawaii for shooting a video, but he's like, I wish I was in my set for this one. I wish I'm having trouble getting videos out. Yeah. Right? But then the question becomes, as I like extrapolate this further and further out, it's like, if I wish Johnny was explained, I would just want to have access to ask Johnny questions there.

11:45And that's what Zuck is doing. That's what he's doing. Instead of asking Johnny Harris to make the video, or instead of waiting for Johnny Harris to make a video, you're asking which video basically he should make and having a conversation in real time. I mean, dude, the reality is some of this already exists. I could probably train a model on every Johnny Harris video and then go explain this to me like Johnny Harris. That in a way already exists. And then as you extrapolate that into the future, is that what the AI-fication of creators becomes? It was an eerie thing to watch on stage, candidly.

12:19And as I think about it more and more, it's increasingly more eerie. Because originally when, you know, in 2023 MetaConnect, Zuck announced like chat, AI chat. And he expanded that with new voices this year. But like chat feels really safe. It reminds me of Smarter Child from AIM. AIM or AIM? Both are valid. Okay. Aim. Like we used to, we've had text prompting AI for actually quite some time. That feels safe. But seeing how photorealistic Don Allen Stevenson looked, that's where it took it a step to go, okay, this does already exist. The latency of the voice, if that gap gets closed, is that a more interesting way to engage with creators than like the way they want to present information to you?

13:06at least at this point I'm not super interested in that like for our brand I think it sort of pushes the bounds and extends the parasocial relationship between a creator and the audience when an audience member can ask a specific question that pertains to their life and their interests and it can look potentially indistinguishable from real life even if it says made with AI I still think it can have an emotional impact on someone of course it can inevitably you would have to imagine that like kids would use it or anyone would use it and feel like they had a relationship with the creator and i think about explaining that to a child who's like yeah like johnny harris is my friend and i'm like oh well no he's not your friend yeah and they're like but yeah i told him about my soccer game yeah and he chimed in on it that would be a weird conversation between like a 12 year old having a conversation about a soccer game and then johnny talking about like world politics and borders.

14:06Yeah. But it could happen. Sure. And how do you explain that new reality where it's like, I know what you thought you experienced on your phone or in an AR environment was really that person, but it wasn't. And I know it's entertaining and it was tailored specifically to you, but. So that was truly like one of the most interesting parts of MetaConnect was seeing that. So what do you do? What is the action that can be taken if we're looking at a world where there are AI versions of creators that are essentially being the real-time storytellers? And that's this new form of content. It's not like we make something, you sit and watch and listen to it.

14:50It's like we actually are just making something together. Yeah. I think my honest opinion is that trust and credibility is always going to play a major role in storytelling. And so even when we look at that, the AI of Don Alan Stevenson only has credibility because of Don Alan Stevenson right now. The fact that he wrote a book on AI that you can talk to him specifically about that subject matter, I think that will still be the reality in the future. We also could be, I mean, you guys tell us what you think about this, but we could be, you know, we see a lot of new tech and a lot of future tech.

15:26And I think we immediately jump to like, what if this is widely adopted? The question becomes, is it going to be widely adopted? You know, like, and maybe it won't. But the most defensible thing you can do as a creator is like, have a very distinct POV and a very distinct area of expertise. Right? So that the obvious is like, the audience knows exactly what to go to you for. perspective matters, vision matters, taste matters, brand matters. I also think verifiably human activities will really matter. And we're seeing it in the rise of live sports, right? Like live sports are so verifiably human.

16:09Like no one knows what's going to happen on either side and watch and see what happens. But we're seeing that seep into like, you know, like Kaysenat did like the little basketball league, right? Yeah. Or he's playing in this like, just totally dreamt up new basketball league. And it's like funny because it's a meme, right? But it's also interesting because it's like sports. It's competition. And we know it's just like verifiably, this is a human experience that's happening and we're getting to watch it. Yeah. Wow. I just thought of like a roast and now I have to do it because I thought of it.

16:38Okay. And I'm sorry. Of me? Are you going to play in the league? Oh my God. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. When you visit the

17:17All right, man. I apologize before I said it. Can we talk about wearables? Yeah, let's go. Okay. Wearables. Yes, I am. If you're listening, I am wearing the Ray-Ban Meadows right now and the clear ones where you can see all the tech. I mean, wearables is always the most exciting thing in any of these announcements, right? Like, and the reason why wearables matter to this conversation of what will YouTube look like in the future is because wearables likely will play a role in how we consume YouTube. If werewolves are widely adopted in the same way that smartphones were, in the same way that the iPhone was adopted, then it will be a major screen for audiences in the future.

17:57And that is why it matters. That's why it's important. Now, going to Meta and spending the day there, the biggest thing was Orion, which is their new AR glasses. I would say the biggest thing was meeting Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, the biggest thing for us was meeting Mark Zuckerberg. The biggest thing that they announced was Orion, the AR glasses. And those paired with these, the Ray-Bans, which are like the most sleek, best looking design of wearables that I've personally seen. The Orion glasses and getting to try them, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, we were like two of a hundred people. That's what I've heard.

18:31That's what they said. Yeah. Maybe a couple hundred people. Two of like a hundred or maybe, they said like hundreds of people who've tried it and that there were only like a thousand made or something at this point. Yeah. I mean, look, if you've tried Apple Vision Pro with like pass-through, you've seen something kind of similar to what this looks and feels like, but it's a very sleek design. It's very, very easy to put on and navigate. It calibrates to your eyes. Your eyes operate as the cursor, which is similar to Apple Vision Pro. And then your fingers, you wear a wristband and your fingers operate as the click.

19:05So you can look at something and click on it. If you're getting a call, you can look at the answer button and use your two fingers to click. You can go back home with the UI. You can open up Instagram and you can actually use your thumb to swipe through Instagram. The amazing thing is how intuitive it is. Like they have built incredibly intuitive tech into this. Now there's also this, you know, this demo that they show of not only like video calls were actually really interesting and cool, but like holograms of AI avatars. So now we take what we just brought up with Don Allen Stevenson and that creator, you know, AI FaceTime type thing, and you bring that into wearable tech.

19:50Now I'm having lunch, I'm wearing glasses that look and feel like this, and I queue up MKBHD to sit with me and go, I'm trying to make a decision on what phone to buy next. Can we talk about it? Mm-hmm. he's like sure what questions do you have yeah now when we think about that from the creator perspective like we just said like having a brand having something that you stand for would be the reason why i queue you up with my wearables but another quote from zuck is is also important to recognize here where he says maybe in the future there will be content that is purely generated by ai by the system personalized just for you there will be ai creators and creators building ai versions of themselves.

20:34I do think that is a reality. That a lot of these platforms most likely will, in fact, even use the data from our videos that have already been posted to then generate new videos specifically tailored to people. And it might seem weird and strange now, but there will be people growing up who probably see that as the norm. And that is the most affordable video that those platforms can make that probably does not require revenue shares and potentially satisfies the viewer in a way that human content cannot. That's like, we have to live in a world where that maybe is happening. So then what matters?

21:20What do you have to believe? And it goes back to verifiably human. Like I do believe that humans will always put value on human creations that they know are in fact human and like have imperfections. Yeah. I actually think Meta will soon become more a hardware company than they are a software company. And that's interesting. Like they're actually gunning it to compete with the iPhone. Whether or not you believe me with what I just said, that like glasses, computer glasses could compete with the iPhone. Like I actually think if we look out years and years and years and years in the future, it will be odd to look at photos of us looking down at phones.

22:02I did have that feeling when I put on the Orion glasses of, wow, I just got my eyes and my hands back. Yeah. And my like posture. And my posture. That's the crazy thing is you got your posture back. You're like, wait, I'm still engaging with like everything I'm familiar with from an app perspective. Like my apps are in front of my eyes. And of course that happens with Apple vision pro, but it's so bulky. Yeah, it's too heavy on your face. Like these glasses are so lightweight So yeah, I think like the the the if you follow the track of like what entertainment will look like in 2050 You have to think about how we'll be consuming it Like the phone changed our dynamic from the movie screen the movie screen changed our dynamic from the radio right all these Ways in which we consume entertainment have changed the way storytellers tell stories and the ways that audiences want their entertainment.

22:55I don't think we could have ever anticipated 15-second videos could create celebrities when we were, you know, when people in 1960 were watching movies and those were the biggest celebrities. So we have to follow the track of going like, where is this all headed? While we were recording, I posted on X and I said, YouTube in 2050, what's it look like? And one of the top responses here is, I can't wait to watch Michelle Carey's challenge accepted on my Apple Vision contact lenses. And you know what? That is not that far from the vision that we're kind of painting here that you will be wearing some sort of glasses and watching creators slash interacting with them in real time.

23:39All right, let's talk about the biggest hits here in terms of YouTube. Let's talk about thumbnails. Let's talk about subscribers. Let's talk about monetization. How did those evolve over the next 25 years? Okay, when it comes to titles and thumbnails, I think in the very near future, we're going to get the ability to A-B test titles as well. Right now, we can A-B test thumbnails. But to take it a step further, Kennegra Dion, who we had on the show, said that, you know, on Netflix, you'll get served a thumbnail for a show that's right for you. So like, if you're into romantic comedies, there may be an action movie that also has a subplot that's kind of like a romantic comedy, but you like action, so it'll show you the version of the thumbnail that's good for action, right?

24:20I think that will most likely come to YouTube. AI-generated thumbnails that are tailored to what you like to watch. Yeah, I think the whole theme is like, how can this get increasingly more personalized to the viewer? Okay, what's next? Subscribers. Subscribers. Subscribers, I don't know. No, when we were at YouTube in New York, Ryan Trahan made a suggestion that I really loved, which was, you know on Spotify, where it says monthly listeners, let's say like 3 million monthly listeners. What if we had monthly viewers on YouTube? It's really interesting because it kind of shows you actually how hot a creator is in any given month.

25:02It's a better indicator potentially than subscribers. Yeah, it's a better indicator. Subscribers is such a legacy metric that I don't know when or if YouTube adjusts that. And that's too big of a way to like, it potentially would bum a lot of creators out to have that public metric of monthly viewers. Oh my gosh, if it goes down, it'd be a huge bummer for your audience to know like, damn, really tough month for you. And the industry already looks at public performance and like how you're doing. Like there's all our metrics are public. You can still figure that out. You can go on any other platform and figure that out of how many monthly viewers this person has right now.

25:40But it's interesting to think about, like, do subscribers still matter? How small do you think play buttons are going to get? How digital are they going to get? They're going to be digital. They're probably like a little NFT that comes to you. Yeah. All right, monetization. How does revenue sharing work in a world where we saw like Donnell and Stevenson, right? Like, are you licensing your face in that context? Definitely, yeah. I think there's a world of like, if you choose to licensing your, like an AI version of yourself or making it available to certain models, making that even like a paid experience.

26:17Is it time, time spent? Like what if the platforms paid you based on how much time was spent with your AI avatar? Like hours. Yeah, I don't feel good about that. Like, is it hours spent? Is it like, oh man, like people logged a thousand hours with your AI this month. so you get a shit you get like a monetization based on that probably i mean that is kind of the way like right yeah yeah i don't know and and do like does wearable cpms go higher than television cpms or is it lower because you're distracted because you're actually like only watching the video off to the right yeah or is advertising in wearable in the wearable world totally different is it like digital billboards yeah and then you pay for like a premium version where you don't have digital billboards, but like you're wearing these glasses and then I'm looking at you and like an ad pops up here.