YouTube CEO Neal Mohan on AI, Censorship & the Future of Creators

YouTube’s creator economy is enormous, but its 45% advertising cut is increasingly optional for top creators. Neil Mohan said YouTube paid creators and media partners more than $70 billion in three years, while acknowledging major creators may be better off selling their own advertising.

YouTube now behaves more like television infrastructure than a social network. It has been America’s largest streaming platform for roughly two years and accounts for about 13–14% of television viewing, excluding all viewing on phones.

YouTube’s scale increasingly comes from both advertising and subscriptions. Mohan said roughly 2 billion people visit daily and YouTube Premium has about 125 million subscribers, although advertising remains the dominant source of creator payouts.

YouTube is deliberately rebuilding traditional television inside its own ecosystem rather than simply replacing it with creator videos. YouTube TV is being developed around sports and news, while “Primetime Channels” lets viewers buy traditional channels individually inside the main YouTube app.

Mohan said YouTube’s COVID-era misinformation policies are gone, but stopped short of admitting the platform’s approach was mistaken. He defended the restrictions as products of an extraordinary information environment and said YouTube’s rules must remain flexible as circumstances change.

Running YouTube globally requires continually compromising its free-expression principles against national law. Mohan described freedom of speech as YouTube’s starting position, but said enforcement inevitably combines global policies, country-specific legal requirements, automated systems and human judgment.

YouTube’s most consequential AI plan is not merely labeling synthetic videos but giving people control over AI copies of themselves. Mohan said YouTube is developing “likeness detection,” modeled on Content ID, so creators could potentially remove, permit or even claim monetization from videos using their face or voice.

YouTube expects AI-generated and human-made media to become too intertwined for “AI content” to be treated as a separate category. Its approach is therefore disclosure plus ordinary content rules: some generated videos receive AI labels, while policy enforcement depends on what the video contains rather than how it was produced.