YouTube celebrated its 20th birthday last month. Currently, users watch more than a billion hours of content on the Google-owned video platform every day. And increasingly, that content is streamed on TVs rather than smartphones. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan recently announced that YouTube’s TV viewership surpassed smartphone viewership in the United States for the first time. To understand why, we turned to Kurt Wilms, a senior director of product management who oversees the company’s living room strategy. In a recent interview on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies podcast, he talked about how content creators can optimize for the big screen and why so many people watch the same videos on their TV and on their phones—simultaneously.
YouTube viewers now watch more hours of video on TV screens rather than their phones. What prompted that shift?
When YouTube started 20 years ago, everyone said that it was going to take over TV. Then, after it launched, smartphones got really big and YouTube kind of became synonymous with mobile phone [viewing]. We’re seeing that shift back to TV now. TVs are getting more technically capable, they’re getting cheaper, and more people are cutting the cord. And YouTube, with our vast array of content creators, makes every type of content you’d want to watch.
You lead the team responsible for the living room effort. What does that mean?
Living room is this word we use internally at YouTube: It means the version of YouTube that you would watch on a smart tv. We design and develop the entire experience from when you first land on the homepage and you get video recommendations to searching to the player. We developed the whole experience.
How do you adapt mobile-first content for a bigger screen?
One of the beautiful things about YouTube for a creator is that you film and then, once you upload it to YouTube, we handle the rest for you. That being said though, some of the things we’ve been seeing are creators investing in higher technical quality of video. The portion of [videos] uploaded to YouTube in 4K is up 35% year over year. I think that’s creators noticing that their viewership is shifting to TV. The other thing I’ve heard from a lot of creators is that half a decade ago, when they were making their video and they were doing their edits, they would think, Someone’s going to watch this on a phone, so it can’t be longer than 10 minutes. Now they don’t have to worry about that anymore. Viewers love watching longer content on the TV.
I read that people often play the same content on their screen and their phone simultaneously. Why is that?
There’s third-party studies that basically say 80 to 90% of viewers are on their phone while they’re watching TV. YouTube’s a little unique in the TV space. Our service is interactive. You’re interacting with the creators, you’re interacting with other viewers. We have features like the YouTube comments section. One of the things that we found is that it’s quite difficult to use some of these features with a remote control. Imagine typing out a comment with your remote, for example. We invest a lot in features where you can open YouTube on your phone and it connects automatically with the content you’re watching on TV, and you can do things like share the video to your friends and read the comments at the same time.
Does that change the way people consume content? Are viewers more engaged?
Viewers give us two themes. One is: I want to just lean back and watch their content and chill out. The other thing we hear is that because YouTube is so interactive, we call it lean in, where people want to read the comments, like the video, and subscribe to creators or channels. So we try to make it super seamless.
What is the Watch With feature you’re piloting?
There’s this huge ecosystem of YouTube creators who basically make videos talking about live events while [they’re] happening. We’ve done studies where we talk to viewers—and 50% of them would rather listen to a creator talk about a live event than watch the event itself. Watch With is a feature that is going to be rolling out more broadly over the course of this year. [It makes it] so you don’t have to pull up a YouTube video on one screen with a creator and then pull up the actual video on the side or on another device. Watch With will be an experience where you can see the event and also have the commentary from your favorite creator side by side.
How did you select the creators to partner with on this?
There’s so many creators who make a certain content format on YouTube, but they have a side passion they want to explore. Michelle Khare, who makes challenge content on YouTube. It turns out she’s an avid road biker– and now she does Tour de France commentary. I think it’s a win-win for both the creators and the content owners because it’ll bring a lot of new viewers to this content, and maybe they’re not interested in watching [the Tour de France, for example], but they’re so tied to a creator that they’ll tune in just to see what the creator’s going to say about it.
Are creators prioritizing long-form content as more viewers tune in on their TV?
In general, every type of content is watched on the TV. The stuff that does really well on traditional TV also does really well on YouTube on TV, like Sports. I believe the watch time on TV for sports content has grown 30% year over year. Viewers are [also] watching over 400 million hours of podcast monthly on TV. There’s a huge transition in the podcast world happening, moving from audio-only to video.
Even on TV, we have our Shorts product. You might think it’s a mobile-first format. We built a Shorts experience on the TV, and we had in mind that it would do okay. But when we turned it on, the usage skyrocketed. So we started talking to the viewers who were watching Shorts on TV, and these same concepts came up. If you want to watch short-form videos with friends and family, do you crowd around a smartphone? No. You put it on your TV, you sit on your couch, and you watch it together.
How do you think about incorporating ads into the TV experience?
We try really hard to make it as seamless as we can. One of the things we realized is when you’re watching longer-form content, when you’re watching a 20-minute video, you don’t want to get hit all the time with interruptions. That’s annoying. So we try to do what traditional television does, which is to, as much as possible, pod the ads together so you’re interrupted less frequently—and when you are, it’s [for] a little bit longer. That change on TV resulted in more viewership as well as more revenue.
We’re also trying to do TV-first ad formats where we don’t need to interrupt you all the time. An example would be direct-response ads, where we can put an ad somewhere, and if you’re interested in it, you can scan a QR code. We launched an ad format recently called pause ads, [so after] you pause the video, when you come back, [there’s an ad for you to watch], and if you’re into it, you can scan the QR code.
Who are your favorite content creators?
I love watching chess. There’s this guy in New York, Gotham Chess, who does a lot of commentary. l watch a lot of soccer; I follow this team, AC Milan, and it has this U.S. player, Christian Pulisic. There’s this creator named Kush who does a lot of commentary after the games.
No comments