YouTube CEO Neal Mohan Interview with Peter Kafka: Q&A

I spoke with Mohan about both of these topics and more during a recent interview, and you can hear it all on Channels, the weekly podcast I host.

But in these edited excerpts, I focused on two things: YouTube’s long-standing practice of sharing half of its revenue with many of the people who upload videos to the site — which is unusual for a major Internet platform — and how in which Mohan will handle claims of electoral fraud surrounding the upcoming US presidential election.

Mohan is pretty good at not saying things he doesn’t want to say — he told me a day after testifying in one of the federal government’s two antitrust cases against its parent company Google — but I think that you can still understand what he is thinking here.

One thing I think about a lot is that you are the only major non-pornographic platform to distribute a significant portion of the revenue to the people making the videos. (Your payment) is 55% for a regular video. Why do you think none of your competitors from Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat have set up a system like you have?

That’s a good question. Why do you think this is the case?

It’s expensive.

(nod)

You nod. This is an audio environment, but you’re nodding your head.

I think what I would say is that we’re really proud of the fact that we’re not only the original, but the greatest creator of the economy.

And the creators, when they talk to me, basically focus on two things. First, of course, it helps them find and build an audience. Without that, nothing else matters.

But the second thing is that many creative people want to make a living. They want to build a business on YouTube. And so those are the two fundamental conversations we have. And in the last three years, as you know, we’ve paid $70 billion into the creator economy. It is something we are extremely proud of.

But to be a devil’s advocate — you don’t look at people on Instagram, people on TikTok and say, “They’re building huge businesses. Creators seem to make things for themselves. They get nothing out of or get very little compared to what we pay, I wish we could pay less.” Are you having that conversation?

Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world that is at the heart of what we do. And you can’t do that in a meaningful way without also giving (creators) the means to build a livelihood on the platform.

But instead of 55%, it could be 25%, right? It would still be better than any other deal you get anywhere else. You still offer all these tools. People will still use you because you still cut bigger checks than anyone else. Why not do this?

I’m a firm believer that the real path to success here is growing the overall pie…rather than thinking about whether the share should be X or Y.

You launched yourself Shorts a few years ago. It’s your TikTok cloneand which has a different payment. It’s 45% instead of 55%. Why is it a lower percentage?

Well, the mechanics of monetizing shorts work a little differently. The mode is the consumption in a stream that you scroll through. So those dollars are cumulative unlike how it works in a traditional YouTube long form, where the ads are paired with the videos. So even the rev ratio concept, just there at a basic level, is a little bit different.

There are other things that go into producing and creating short content that are just different in terms of cost structure. A lot of Shorts is about creating within the platform. So there’s a lot of resources that we invest in to make those creation tools work, to make all those filters and effects work the way they do, so they’re going to be streamed. So it’s just a different set of services that we offer creators than long form, which as you know has traditionally grown through people just uploading to YouTube.

So your costs are higher.

There’s just a lot of tools and services that we offer in that context, the context of mobile creation, that traditional YouTube long-form videos didn’t have as that part of the business.

So here’s a hypothetical, but no that hypothetical scenario. I assume you’ve thought about it: We’re going to have an election in November, and there’s a scenario where Donald Trump loses — he’s declared the loser by news organizations — and Donald Trump and his allies say, “That’s not true. We will fight this. Basically, we’ll resume Stop Theft.” Have you thought about how you will deal with people who say the election was rigged?

I will say a few things. First, as in 2020 and 2022 and in dozens and dozens of elections around the world, accountability is our top priority. I have a team that focuses on election integrity. We just finished the biggest election in the world that took place over six, seven weeks in India, where we went through a lot of that and we had to stay vigilant. And the US election will be no different in this context. And so all the tools that we’ve learned have been effective here will be tools and capabilities that we’ll have at our disposal.

I’ll explain the hierarchy (of our plan) from my point of view, which is primarily—and really, where a lot of the action happens on a platform like YouTube—making sure that we’re actually growing content that comes from authorized sources.

You go on YouTube, look for information. And so you should get it from those types of sources, whether it’s CNN or The New York Times or Fox News. That will be first.

It is not what is talked about a lot, but this is actually what users are experiencing.

Our election integrity rules are pretty clear. We will implement them regardless of what happens there.

But the other thing that’s also very important is that we have these basic principles, but we have to remain flexible to what’s actually happening in the environment. And we will be in this case too.

If we have a replay of 2020, where is this year’s equivalent Rudy Giuliani they’re walking around with Donald Trump saying, “There’s fraud here, there’s fraud there,” they’re making up claims—guys, you’re in no position to judge whether they’re making up those claims. Do you allow them to put them on YouTube? Do you allow people to report these claims?

In general, we are an open platform of a really broad political discourse. And as you know, before the election, after the election, a lot of the political discourse is very heated, a lot of opinions are flying around. And the basis of how YouTube works is that we allow that content to exist and for people to access that content. But what happens is also this content from authoritative sources, news sources that actually cover the details, the analysis rises to the top in the recommendations, but you also see it very prominently in the breaking news shelf when you open the app when I’m looking for this type of information.

Keep asking what stays up and what goes down. But what I’m trying to say is that a lot of what’s actually important to the user experience is a lot of these partnerships that we have with news organizations and whose content actually appears.

That seems totally reasonable to me, but I live in reality. I’m a fact-based person. But there will be people who will say, “What happened to a conspiracy theorist? The video is still there, but don’t push it on me. Instead you show me biased news from ABC or CNN or the New York Times and don’t give me what I want. You are involved in some kind of censorship.

We can do a few things. First, we must be clear about our principles, as I hope I have been able to articulate here. And then we have to be transparent about our community rules, and then we have to do our best to actually enforce them. And we will be criticized regardless of the types of decisions made, but our duty is to be principled, to be transparent and to have high-quality enforcement of our traffic rules.

Do you ever look longingly at Elon Musk and what he does on Twitter and say, “Man, would my job be so much easier if we just didn’t get involved in moderation at all?”

I think our approach to accountability, the way we think about the rules of our community, is central to how YouTube works. It’s what our users expect from us, it’s what our creators expect, and it’s what our advertisers and brand partners expect on YouTube. And you should expect us to continue with those basic principles.

Amazon just picked up a digital package from the NBA. You are a big NBA fan. I heard and I believe it was some Report you found out that you made an offer for that package. Is it true?

Look, we talk to the NBA all the time. They have been a very old partner for several decades now. They operate very large channels. Teams operate channels. I’m not going to comment on anything specific other than I remain a very ardent Warriors fan.