YouTube’s CEO on hefty creator payouts, election deniers, and the NBA: Q&A

I talked to Mohan about both of those topics, and much more, during a recent interview, and you can listen to the entire thing over at Channels, the weekly podcast I host.

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

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

One thing I think about a lot is the fact that you guys are the only major non-pornographic platform to hand out a significant chunk of revenue to people who make the videos. [Your payout] is 55% for a regular video. Why do you think none of your competitors at Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat have instituted a system like the one you guys have?

It’s a good question. Why do you think that’s the case?

It’s expensive.

[nods]

You’re nodding. This is an audio medium, but you’re nodding.

I guess what I would say is we are really proud of the fact that we’re not just the original, but the largest creator economy.

And creators, when they speak with me, they’re fundamentally focused on two things. First and foremost, of course, is helping them find and build an audience. Without that, nothing else matters.

But the second thing is lots of creative people want to earn a living. They want to build a business on YouTube. And so those are the two fundamental conversations we have. And the last three years, as you know, we’ve paid out $70 billion to the creator economy. That is something we are enormously proud of.

But to be a devil’s advocate — don’t you look at the folks at Instagram, the folks at TikTok, and go “They’re building huge businesses. Creators seem to be making stuff for them. They’re not getting anything out of it, or they’re getting very little compared to what we pay. I wish we could pay less.” Do you have that conversation?

Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world that’s core to what we do. And you can’t do that in any 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’re still providing all those tools. People are still going to use you because you’re still cutting bigger checks than anybody else. Why not do that?

I am a firm believer that the real path to success here is to grow the overall pie … as opposed to thinking about whether the share should be X or Y.

You rolled out Shorts a couple of years ago. It’s your TikTok clone, and that has a different payout. It’s 45% instead of 55%. Why is that a lower percentage?

Well, the mechanics of Shorts monetization work a little bit differently. The modality is consumption in a feed that you’re scrolling through. So those dollars are pooled as opposed to the way that they work in kind of traditional YouTube long-form, with the ads being associated with the videos. So, just even the concept of rev share, just there at a base level, is a bit different.

There are other things also that go into producing and having Shorts content created that are just different in terms of the cost structure. A lot of Shorts is about creation within the platform. So there’s a lot of resources we invest in to make it so that those creation tools are effective, that all those filters and effects work the way that they do, so that they get distributed in the feed. So it’s just a different set of services that we offer to creators vs. long-form, which, as you know, traditionally has grown up through people just uploading to YouTube.

So your costs are greater.

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

So here’s a hypothetical, but not that hypothetical scenario. I assume you have thought about it: We’re going to have an election in November, and there’s a scenario where Donald Trump loses — is declared the loser by news organizations — and Donald Trump and his allies say, “This is not true. We’re going to fight this. We’re going to basically replay Stop the Steal.” Have you thought about how you’re going to handle people saying that the election was fraudulent?

I’ll say a few things. First, just like 2020 and 2022 and the dozens and dozens of elections around the world, responsibility is our top priority. I have a team that is focused on election integrity. We just concluded the world’s largest election that happened over six, seven weeks, in India, where we went through a lot of this and had to remain vigilant. And the US election is not going to be different in that context. And so all the tools that we have learned have been effective here are going to be tools and capabilities that we’re going to have in place.

I’ll explain the hierarchy [of our plan] from my standpoint, which is first and foremost — and really, where a lot of the action happens on a platform like YouTube — making sure that we’re actually raising up content that comes from authoritative sources.

You go to YouTube, you’re looking for information. And so you should get it from those types of sources, whether that’s CNN or The New York Times or Fox News. That’s going to be first and foremost.

It’s not what gets talked a lot about, but that’s actually what users experience.

Our election integrity rules of the road are pretty clear. We are going to enforce those regardless of what happens there.

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

If we have a replay of 2020, where this year’s equivalent of Rudy Giuliani is running around with Donald Trump saying, “There’s fraud here, there’s fraud there,” making up claims — you guys aren’t in a position to evaluate whether they’re making up those claims. Do you allow them to put those on YouTube? Do you allow people to report on those claims?

Generally speaking, we are an open platform of really wide political discourse. And, as you know, leading up to an election, post an election, a lot of that political discourse is very heated, lots of opinions flying around. And the basis for how YouTube works is we allow for that content to exist and for people to access that content. But what’s also happening is this content from authoritative sources, news sources that are actually covering the details, the analysis rises to the top in recommendations, but you also see it very visibly in the breaking news shelf when you open up the app when you’re searching for that type of information.

You keep asking about what stays up and what comes 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 shows up.

That sounds totally reasonable to me, but I live in reality. I’m a fact-based person. But there’s going to be people who go, “What happened to so-and-so conspiracy theorist? The video is still there, but you’re not pushing it to me. Instead, you’re showing me the biased news from ABC or CNN or New York Times, and you’re not giving me what I want. You are engaged in bias, you’re engaged in some sort of censorship.”

We can do a couple of things. First is, we have to be clear in terms of our principles, like hopefully I’ve been able to articulate for you here. And then we have to be transparent about what our community guidelines are, and then we have to do our best to actually enforce against those. And we’re going to get criticized regardless of the types of decisions make, but our duty is to be principled about it, transparent about it, and to have really high-quality enforcement around our rules of the road.

Do you ever sort of look longingly over at Elon Musk and what he’s doing at Twitter and go, “Man, my job would be much easier if we just didn’t really involve ourselves in moderation very much at all?”

I think that our approach to responsibility, how we think about our community guidelines, is core to how YouTube operates. It’s what our users expect of 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 core principles.

Amazon just picked up a digital package from the NBA. You’re a big NBA fan. I’d heard, and I think there’s been some reporting out that you guys made an offer for that package. Is that true?

Look, we talk to the NBA all the time. They have been a super longstanding partner for a couple decades now. They operate very large channels. The teams operate channels. I’m not going to comment on anything specific other than the fact that I remain a very ardent Warriors fan.