How YouTube CEO Neal Mohan conquered the living room and positioned creators as ‘the new Hollywood’

YouTube isn’t just a website anymore. And computers and smartphones aren’t even the primary ways that people watch YouTube content, either.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, in his annual letter to the YouTube community yesterday, wrote, “TV has surpassed mobile and is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S.”

At the same time, he said, creators “have moved from filming grainy videos of themselves on desktop computers to building studios and producing popular talk shows and feature-length films.”

Ahead of posting his letter, Mohan spoke with Fast Company about how YouTube—which is celebrating its 20th year—is responding to changing viewer habits and giving creators on the platform the tools they need to be “the new Hollywood.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you think is innovative about YouTube’s transition to the living room?

When people turn on the TV, they’re turning on YouTube—especially young people. So television really is YouTube these days. That’s an overnight success that’s been many years in the making. We’ve been investing heavily in the viewer and consumer experience of YouTube on living room screens.

Then, for creators: Creators really are the new Hollywood. They’re the new forms of entertainment. They’re building creator-led studios. In some ways they’re the new startup economy in Hollywood. They’re hiring people, they’re providing jobs to lots of people, and they really are about this new form of entertainment.

Has YouTube fundamentally changed as a result?

YouTube really is kind of its own thing. We’re not a social media platform. People don’t go there to connect with their friends. They come to watch their favorite type of content, whether it’s a podcast, a creator, traditional media, live sports. We’re also not a traditional broadcaster. We’re something that’s in its own lane. You come to YouTube if you want to watch a 15-second YouTube Short, a 15-minute long-form video from your favorite creator, or a 15-hour livestream.

One of the big sort of stories this year has been about the growth of podcasters on YouTube, particularly video podcasters. And interestingly, one of the places where we all consume those podcasts is on television screens.

There’s over a billion hours of YouTube consumed on television screens globally every single day. The living room is our fastest-growing screen. Of the top creators on YouTube, the number who get the majority of their watch time from the living room has grown 400% year on year. And the number of creators who earn the most revenue through their living room consumption has grown 30% year on year.

What have you heard from creators about what they need to succeed on traditional TV sets, and how have you responded?

We’ve invested heavily in bringing the interactivity that we all, as viewers, love about YouTube to the living room screen, whether through more prominent abilities to subscribe, so that creators can grow their subscription counts, [or] through linking, so links that creators have in their videos are more seamless through QR codes on screens.

It’s also about having a second-screen experience by linking your phone to the television set. You may have noticed that when you go to a creator’s channel page on YouTube, you get this cinematic experience of their content. [YouTube allows] creators to organize their videos in terms of episodes and seasons.

And then finally, AI plays a big role in terms of empowering creators and human creativity. For example, allowing creators to auto-dub their videos in multiple languages seamlessly and automatically when they upload a video, or helping creators solve the blank-screen problem, working with Gemini integrated directly into YouTube Studio so that you can cowrite with Gemini and produce a script for your video.

Is it a challenge to move to the living room screen, or is that viewing experience just the same thing, only bigger and further from the keyboard?

The living room screen was our fastest-growing screen before the pandemic—back all the way to 2019—through the pandemic, and obviously since then. So it’s been a very big area of investment for us. We have worked closely with our device manufacturer partners—people who make connected TVs—to create a world-class living room experience.

What is exciting from my perspective is that I think we’re just getting started. The opportunity before us, especially around the world, is enormous.

What comes next?

Our job is to build the world’s best stage. All of our technological investment, all of our product innovation, is about building that stage. One of the fastest-growing sort of sleeper-success products on the living room is actually YouTube Shorts, which you think of as like a mobile-only type of a product. But lots and lots of Shorts consumption viewership happens in the living room. And [we’re going to continue] to double down our investments in AI to really empower human creativity. So those are two areas that you should expect to see more from us in 2025.

You’re still pretty new to this role. How would you describe your personal touch at YouTube? What’s the Neal imprint?

I’ve been at YouTube for a very long time, almost a decade. And my relationship with YouTube actually goes back to before either I or YouTube were part of Google, so almost 17, 18 years. As I’ve been in the CEO role now for the last couple of years, I would say my focus is to continue to do a lot of those things that I’ve done: first, really focusing on technology and product innovation. I’m a technologist at heart, but I also love media.