YouTube at 20: How the Video Colossus Launched the Creator Economy and Turned From Hollywood Foe to Friend

It’s a muggy morning the day before the 2025 Super Bowl in New Orleans, and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan is stuck in parade traffic and not happy about it. It’s not so much the French Quarter gridlock or the humidity that’s bothering him, but that he’s late for a meeting with a YouTube creator. They’re supposed to make a video together, and it involves slime.

“I should have pulled the trigger half an hour ago,” Mohan says to an aide, and then orders everyone out of the car: They’re going to walk the 1.7 miles to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. Mohan will be damned if he’s not going to go the extra mile for the particular breed of content creator known as a “YouTuber.”

Over the past 20 years, Google-owned YouTube has become the world’s most-watched video platform, bar none. It’s the home base of countless self-made influencers, podcasters, commentators and entrepreneurs and over time has made it into the big leagues of TV through rights deals with the NFL, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal.

The platform that helped introduce the world to streaming with its launch two decades ago has had a twisty-turny journey in Hollywood on its way to establishing itself as a digital household utility. If you want to find anything on video, the search invariably starts on YouTube. This is a dramatic shift from the first few years of YouTube’s existence, when most of Hollywood viewed the Silicon Valley-born company as a copyright-infringing pariah.

Now, no major studio or network can afford not to post its trailers, clips, previews and promotional interviews on the platform. And those same studios and networks are starting to make significant money from YouTube, whether it’s in carriage fees for channels distributed via YouTube TV or by making select television shows and movies available for free viewing with advertisements.

“Today, YouTube is television,” says Jeff Zucker, former head of NBCUniversal and CNN. “It’s so many businesses wrapped into one — short-form video, long-form video, live, cable TV. I don’t think any media company today can ignore YouTube. It’s too big and too powerful.”

YouTube’s expansion into cable-like TV service with YouTube TV is another reason Mohan has made the trek to New Orleans. He’s here to schmooze top brass from one of his biggest media partners: the NFL. Starting with the 2023-24 season, YouTube became the exclusive U.S. retailer for the Sunday Ticket out-of-home package, replacing DirecTV — and beating out other highly interested parties, including Apple, for the rights.

At the same time, Mohan is using the hoopla around the Super Bowl to promote the other major part of YouTube’s business — its DIY creators, who have turned video dispatches from their basements into businesses worth seven and eight figures.

“It truly is your own world on YouTube. You run the business, and there’s no network notes or anything like that,” says Sean Evans, host of the popular “Hot Ones” series that challenges celebrity guests to nibble on increasingly spicy chicken wings. It sounds like a jokey idea, but the show that launched in 2015 is up to 360-odd episodes and counting.

Top YouTubers have traveled to the Super Bowl this year to take part in the inaugural NFL-YouTube Creator Flag Football Game, which will be livestreamed on the platform the night before the Philadelphia Eagles play the Kansas City Chiefs at the Superdome. Later in the day, Mohan will loudly cheer from the sidelines at the elaborate exhibition match featuring a mix of influencers, musicians and pro athletes. But for now, he’s on a mission to keep his date with creator Carter Kench for that promised video collab, something that has been the CEO’s calling card. Just before noon, Mohan finds Kench at the convention center. “It’s been a long walk, but it’s great to be here,” says Mohan. His wife and three children have come along too. His kids are big fans of YouTube creators, “like all kids,” he says.

Kench, an L.A-based creator with more than 5.4 million subscribers, has set up the materials for their collab in a booth: They’re going to make slime and color it for the Super Bowl teams — red and green. Kench starts to assure the CEO that making slime is pretty simple, but Mohan says, “I have a slime expert right here,” gesturing to the younger of his two daughters. Over the next hour, he delights his girls with his goopy hands.

Afterward, Mohan marvels at the talents of the creators who make the content that fuels his multibillion-dollar business — the minds behind the 3 million-plus channels who earn a cut of YouTube ad revenue. “They’re amazing, creative people,” he says. “What’s always impressive to me is how they sweat every single detail. It’s inspiring.”

As YouTube celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, Mohan, 51, is about to mark 10 years with the platform. The Google veteran signed on in November 2015 as chief product officer before becoming CEO in 2023.

The executive was born in Lafayette, Indiana, and grew up near Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his parents were both graduate students. When he was a teenager, his family moved back to their hometown of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, India, where he attended high school at St. Francis College. Former classmates described him as “brilliant but shy,” according to a Times of India article.

“I do think I am a reserved fellow, as my wife reminds me,” Mohan says. “I’ll let others decide on the brilliance piece.”

After returning to the States, Mohan attended Stanford University, where he graduated in 1996 with a degree in electrical engineering and later earned an MBA. He was perfectly positioned to be part of the first dot-com boom. Mohan jumped into the budding online-advertising industry back when most Americans had slow dial-up connections and most websites moved at a glacial pace. Mohan eventually rose to senior VP of strategy and product development at digital ad firm DoubleClick. Google liked the company’s technology and acquired it in 2008. In the process of completing the DoubleClick acquisition, Mohan met Susan Wojcicki, an influential player at Google. She was the company’s 16th employee after its founding in 1998.

By the time Mohan met her a decade later, Wojcicki was head of Google’s massive advertising business. The two went on to spend 15 years working together — Wojcicki was tapped to run YouTube in 2014, and Mohan joined her as chief product officer a year later.

“We hit it off from our very first conversation in some legal office boardroom in New York City,” Mohan recalls. The two ad-tech wonks, he says, loved “geeking out on building interesting products for our customers.” He and Wojcicki became close friends.

Wojcicki’s death in August 2024, at age 56, marked the end of an era for Google and YouTube. Mohan was devastated. “I am forever grateful for her friendship and guidance,” he said at the time. “I will miss her tremendously.” Not only was Wojcicki an early employee, but it was her garage in Palo Alto, California, that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented as Google’s first headquarters. Mohan took the reins of YouTube from Wojcicki, which provided a level of continuity that was important for both enterprises.

Wojcicki was a model of a highly effective tech leader focused on building great products in a large organization, Mohan says. And part of the reason for that, he adds, is that “she was also really oriented around people.”

When YouTube was incorporated in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim — the start-up was housed in Hurley’s garage in Menlo Park, California. The very first video was uploaded April 23, 2005, by Karim; titled “Me at the Zoo,” it was a 19-second clip he shot in front of the elephant exhibit at the San Diego Zoo.

The founders actually launched the platform as a site for video dating. But after one week, not a single person had uploaded any videos. So they pivoted to promoting YouTube as a general-purpose video-sharing platform.

It was a long-shot idea, as it wasn’t clear at the time whether the internet could support video delivery at scale, says Roelof Botha, managing partner of Sequoia Capital, the Menlo Park-based venture capital firm that has backed some of Silicon Valley’s most world-beating start-ups. Botha led Sequoia’s total investment of $8.5 million in YouTube.

“The three entrepreneurs were scrappy and smart,” he says, explaining why he made the bet on the fledgling service. “The site was usable in a way that others were not.”

Two decades later, the platform is a massive fire hose that sprays out every kind of content imaginable, watched by an estimated 2.44 billion monthly users in 2024, according to researcher eMarketer. There are vlogs, how-to videos, comedy sketches, music videos, news segments, talk shows, product reviews, video-game playthroughs, life hacks, animated shows, podcasts, TV clips, full movies and movie trailers, stunts, pranks and challenges. More than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. It’s the No. 2 most-visited site in the world, behind only Google.com, and the second-biggest search engine after Google.

Worldwide, users watch on average more than 1 billion hours of YouTube content on TVs every day, according to the company. In the U.S., TVs recently surpassed phones and tablets as YouTube’s No. 1 viewing device. According to Nielsen, for two years running, Americans have spent more time watching YouTube on their TV sets than any other streamer, including Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video.

In 2024, YouTube generated global ad revenue of $36.15 billion, up an impressive 15%. For the 12 months that ended September 2024, YouTube’s subscription revenue topped $15 billion. That was generated by YouTube TV, the biggest internet-delivered live TV service in the U.S. with 8 million-plus customers; YouTube Premium, which provides ad-free videos and other perks; and YouTube Music Premium, a music-only streaming service. This week it announced that it now has more than 125 million subscribers for YouTube Music and Premium services, up from 100 million a year ago.

As a stand-alone entity, apart from Google, YouTube would be worth more than $400 billion, Wall Street analyst firm MoffettNathanson has estimated — more than Disney, Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global combined.

When he was running NBC in the mid-2000s, Zucker saw so much conflict ahead with the upstart video-sharing platform that it drove him to partner with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox to launch a streaming competitor, Hulu, that was known internally as “the YouTube killer” when it was gestating at NBC and Fox.

“The idea behind Hulu was we couldn’t let YouTube take advantage of our IP at NBC and leave us in the dust with no ability to monetize it,” Zucker says.

YouTube now sustains thousands of businesses that have grown into small media companies, primarily by distributing their shows on the platform. Mohan calls them “the start-ups of Hollywood.” Some of the biggest names are Rhett & Link of “Good Mythical Morning”; Mark Rober; MrBeast; and “Hot Ones” producer First We Feast.

Evans and Chris Schonberger launched “Hot Ones” in 2015 as, says Evans, a “skunkworks, freak-show project” when they worked at digital media company Complex. In 2021, BuzzFeed bought Complex, and then in early 2024 sold most of the company — but held on to First We Feast. Then in December 2024, Evans, Schonberger and a group of investors bought First We Feast from BuzzFeed for $82.5 million. Today, “Hot Ones” has millions of fans and has busted into the cultural zeitgeist — including getting spoofed on “Saturday Night Live.”

“There’s no one that I look around at in entertainment and think to myself, ‘Oh, I’d rather have that,’” Evans says. “I just like being king of my castle over here.”

RELATED: Sean Evans on 10 Years of ‘Hot Ones’ on YouTube: ‘The Best Dumb Idea Ever’

Meanwhile, traditional media companies have completely shifted their stance toward YouTube. Initially, many it saw it as a huge piracy threat — epitomized by the 2007 lawsuit filed by Viacom accusing YouTube of “brazen” copyright infringement and demanding more than $1 billion in damages. (The parties reached a settlement in 2014; Google did not pay out any money.)

Now, media firms “view YouTube as a really important part of their future growth strategies, and that is a night-and-day difference from where we were from those early Viacom days,” Mohan says.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell says the Sunday Ticket pact with YouTube didn’t come down to just the dollar amount YouTube was willing to pay. The league wanted a partner with global reach and a younger demographic — both of which YouTube delivers. “I think Neal understood how these mediums were going to collide and how the NFL content could actually be helpful in developing their strategy overall,” says Goodell. “We have great confidence in him.”

In YouTube’s first year, its primary traffic driver was viral videos. Two stood out: In November 2005, a Nike ad featuring Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho improbably hitting a goal’s crossbar with a ball four times in a row became the first YouTube video to reach 1 million views. The following month, fans of “Saturday Night Live” and Andy Samberg uploaded copies of the Lonely Island’s mock-rap short “Lazy Sunday.” It racked up 5 million views before NBC’s lawyers demanded the three-minute clip be pulled down.

YouTube’s founders and Botha recognized that defending the site against claims of copyright infringement was one of its two major risks, along with the technical challenges of scaling performance. They relied on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which limits the liability of online platforms for user-shared material that includes copyrighted content.

But that didn’t satisfy some media companies. YouTube’s first general counsel, Zahavah Levine, recalled on a recent podcast hosted by Botha that prior to the Google acquisition, Universal Music Group “fully unleashed an orchestrated campaign of fear tactics on us” — and she had one UMG exec “literally scream at me over the phone: ‘YouTube was built on the backs of our artists and owes us hundreds of millions of dollars!’” YouTube eventually inked a licensing deal with UMG, which Google had made a precondition of the acquisition’s closing.

To address media companies’ wrath over the misappropriation of their content, YouTube developed Content ID: a system that scans uploads against a database of copyrighted audio and video content. If Content ID finds a match, a copyright owner can block the video or opt to monetize the video with ads.

But Content ID has its critics. The system favors copyright holders, giving them the ability to remove videos that should be covered under fair-use doctrine, argues Katharine Trendacosta, director of policy and advocacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. YouTube’s Content ID was borne out of “wanting big media companies to like them and leave them alone,” she says. “It’s more profitable for them to be partners with these big companies rather than with smaller individual creators.”

Mohan counters that Content ID is the fundamental technology that allows YouTube to be an open platform — to protect the rights of partners and make it economically viable for all creators. From 2021-2023, YouTube paid out some $70 billion to creators, artists, and music and media companies. And Mohan says that wouldn’t be possible without Content ID.

“What Content ID allows us to do is not just talk the talk [about copyright protection] but walk the walk,” says Mohan.

By the end of 2005, YouTube’s corporate headquarters had moved from Hurley’s garage to offices above Amici’s pizzeria in San Mateo, California. The company now accounted for about one-fourth of all internet bandwidth usage in the U.S., and this early surge of growth caught the eye of Google, as well as Yahoo and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Botha recalls that Google “came in with confidence, speed and precision” on an offer for YouTube. Google ultimately closed its acquisition for $1.65 billion in stock in November 2006. (The YouTube founders landed on the price tag because they thought it would be cool to sell the company for 10% more than eBay paid for PayPal in 2002.)

Zucker, who was CEO of NBC Entertainment at the time, certainly remembers “Lazy Sunday” blowing up on YouTube. “We saw it as an opportunity — and a threat,” he says. “YouTube showed us how powerful viral video could be.” He still thinks “Lazy Sunday” was a primary reason Google bought YouTube.

The dawn of the creator economy arguably was in 2007. That’s when the platform introduced its YouTube Partner Program, which shares ad revenue with creators whose channels hit minimum subscriber and viewing thresholds. (The current standard YouTube split is 55% for the channel owner, 45% for the house.) The program, known as YPP, gave rise to a brand-new job: YouTuber. For those with showbiz aspirations, it’s the new version of packing up the car and driving to Hollywood or New York. Never mind that only about 4% of an estimated 50 million creators worldwide earn more than $100,000 per year, according to Goldman Sachs research.

YouTube’s biggest star today is Jimmy Donaldson, the 26-year-old known as MrBeast. He runs the platform’s most-subscribed channel, with more than 370 million followers, garnering a global fan base for his outlandish stunts, wacky big-money giveaways and philanthropic endeavors. Donaldson earned an estimated $85 million for the 12 months ended June 2024, according to Forbes.

Donaldson says the moment he realized YouTube could become a full-time job was with his “I Counted to 100,000!” video, uploaded in January 2017 — in which he literally counted from one to 100,000. He says it took him 40 hours; the video, sped up in parts, runs nearly 24 hours. That video was “the catalyst for everything that followed,” Donaldson says. “It was a big idea, but I was all in.”

But Donaldson’s most audacious project to date wasn’t on YouTube: The reality competition show “Beast Games” was co-produced with Amazon Prime Video. The “Squid Game”-style program, which awarded more than $20 million in prize money to contestants, cost more than $100 million to produce.

“It was an opportunity to expand the MrBeast brand to new audiences and take on a bigger project,” Donaldson says. But, he adds, “YouTube will always be my No. 1 focus, as it powers everything I do. I don’t want to be a creator that loses focus and my channel dies as a result.”

Mohan says he’s “really proud when YouTube is the jumping off point for things that creators can do outside of YouTube” like Donaldson’s “Beast Games.” “I’m rooting for Jimmy in all of his endeavors because he knows, and I know, that sort of the basis of all of that is the investment and hard work that he puts into YouTube,” the CEO says.

RELATED: YouTube’s Super Creators: How MrBeast, Rhett & Link, Michelle Khare, Adam W and More Use the Platform to Power Their Businesses

Over time, media companies have found YouTube fertile ground for promoting content and earning revenue. Yet those companies are also competing with YouTube for consumers’ time and ad dollars. “YouTube is the ultimate frenemy,” says Brian Fuhrer, Nielsen’s senior VP of product strategy.

Netflix brass, when pressed on the question of competing with YouTube, insist the services are complementary. “We compete directly with YouTube for people’s time, for the time they spend on that TV screen. But we have very different strengths,” co-CEO Ted Sarandos told analysts on its Q3 2024 earnings interview.

Dana Walden, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, says any share of viewing that YouTube might take from the Mouse House’s TV and streaming properties is hugely outweighed by the upside of working with the platform. The partnership spans promotional content for Disney+ and Hulu, plus movies and theme parks, as well as advertising and pay-TV distribution.

“YouTube plays a key role in deepening fandom across each segment of our company, and not just streaming,” Walden says. It’s a deeply symbiotic relationship, she says, “one where both Disney and YouTube thrive on the scale, awareness and passion of our audiences.”

One of Disney’s goals with YouTube, Walden says, is “enabling creators to grow that love for our IP.”

René Rechtman, an alum of Maker Studios and Disney, founded children’s entertainment outfit Moonbug Entertainment in 2018 after he realized that none of the top 100 YouTube channels aimed at kids was owned by traditional media companies. “I saw how uninterested kids were in cable TV, and how engaged they were with YouTube creators,” he says.

Moonbug acquired several companies producing content for YouTube: CoComelon, Blippi and Little Baby Bum. One of CoComelon’s top all-time YouTube videos is “Wheels on the Bus” — which has a mind-bending 7.2 billion views (and counting). In 2021, two of Rechtman’s former Disney colleagues, Tom Staggs and Kevin Mayer, came calling with an offer he couldn’t refuse: $3 billion for Moonbug to become part of their new media roll-up company, Candle Media.

“I think this was a greenfield for us because companies like Disney had an existential crisis with Netflix,” Rechtman says. “They were all focused on, How do we compete in this new direct-to-consumer world? They saw YouTube as a marketing platform, which was a big mistake.” YouTube is the biggest free streaming platform in the world, Rechtman says: “How great is that opportunity?”

Among traditional media companies, WWE has one of the biggest footprints on YouTube. Its main channel, launched in May 2007, has served more than 91 billion video views to date and has over 107 million subscribers. That makes it one of the top 10 most-subscribed channels on YouTube.

WWE president Nick Khan says that in the earliest days of YouTube, the only media outlets that covered WWE were those that had licensing agreements with the wrestling entertainment company. “So we were forced to push our content to other platforms to get our message out,” he says.

“We believe we deliver what our fans wanted,” Khan says by way of explaining WWE’s tremendous growth on YouTube with clips, highlights, classic matches and some exclusive material. “We like to be first movers in any space.” And the company has done that without cannibalizing viewing on tentpole properties on TV and other streaming platforms, he says.

Asked whether WWE sees YouTube as a potential distributor for its premium live events in the future, Khan notes that the company’s deal with NBCU’s Peacock runs through March 2026. He says NBCU has been a “tremendous partner,” noting it will have the have the first to renew the rights for Peacock. If not, “we will talk to everyone including YouTube, which has done phenomenally well with Sunday Ticket and YouTube TV,” says Khan.

Will McIntosh, president of NBCU’s Fandango and NBC Sports Next, sees YouTube largely as a partner and not so much as a competitor. Fandango’s content promoting movies coming to theaters and home entertainment performs really well on YouTube. “It’s inarguable — it’s the most important platform from that perspective,” McIntosh says. “Ultimately, we know that manifests itself in ticket sales.”

YouTube also is a partner for Fandango’s Movieclips business, which is currently one of the biggest channels on YouTube with more than 63 million subscribers. It’s a three-way win: Fandango, studios and YouTube each earn revenue from ads served against licensed clips of TV and movie scenes. One of the most-viewed videos on Movieclips’ channel is the “Shake It Off” scene from 2016 animated hit “Sing” (525 million views).

McIntosh says his team works with all the online platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. “None of those partners has risen to the scale of YouTube, with its audience and what we can draw into our platforms,” he says.

Ynon Kreiz, CEO of Mattel, previously ran Maker Studios, the multichannel network company that aggregated thousands of YouTube creators into different vertical segments. Disney bought Maker in 2014. Kreiz observes that YouTube’s evolution over the years — to use technology to better target content and ads to individual viewers and drive engagement — is similar to Mattel’s shift from being a toy manufacturer to a steward of franchises like Barbie and Hot Wheels that engages with fans on an emotional level.

On YouTube, “you can have a two-way conversation with fans, who create their own content around your brands,” he says. “This is not just a place where you put advertising.” Mattel, he says, is spending more creating content specifically for YouTube, where “there’s a commercial model with financial returns.”

Zucker, the one-time YouTube adversary, today is the CEO of media-investment firm RedBird IMI, whose holdings include British production house All3Media, Front Office Sports and studio Media Res. He’s a convert to the notion that YouTube is integral to any media business today. “We know the power of that platform, we know what it can do — and we’re going to continue to try to harness that,” he says.

RELATED: Why YouTube Exited the Original Content Business: ‘We Weren’t Good at Picking Content’

Even as YouTube ramps up subscription revenue, advertising remains its lifeblood. The video platform continues to post double-digit growth off a large revenue base. It’s taking share from traditional TV, where ad sales have slowed or declined: GroupM projects just 1.9% growth worldwide in 2025 for linear television advertising.

Marketers have been attracted to YouTube’s ability to reach viewers from the get-go. YouTube may have been an antagonist to traditional media players — but that wasn’t the case with advertisers. “From the earliest days, advertisers were trying to work with YouTube,” says Brian Wieser, founder and CEO of Madison & Wall, an advisory and data services firm for advertising and tech industries. “If you go back to the early and mid-2000s, advertisers appreciated how important online video advertising was and would become.”

According to Sequoia’s Botha, the ad business made it profitable before the Google acquisition. “The YouTube founders made it very cost effective to deliver video. So you only needed a low monetization rate to be successful,” he says.

YouTube gained the attention of TV advertisers with the introduction in 2014 of Google Preferred. Later rebranded YouTube Select, the program lets marketers target the top 5% of popular channels in categories like entertainment and pop culture, food and music. “That’s when they started to dip their toe into the broader TV spending pool,” says Drew Corry, SVP and group director of strategic investment at ad-buying giant IPG Mediabrands. “If you’re trying to reach consumers by video, you’re going to have some level of investment in YouTube.”

YouTube also has delivered an advertising experience that, from a viewer’s perspective, is superior to TV, says Mattel’s Kreiz. “It’s more user-friendly than traditional linear television, where you have to sit through literally several minutes of advertising per hour,” says Kreiz. He notes that YouTube pioneered skippable ads — a radical concept when it was first introduced in 2010. Mohan, who was involved in developing YouTube’s TrueView skippable ad format, says he’s proud of the innovation: “I do think it’s changed the industry in terms of how advertiser value is conveyed, but in a way that actually also works for all of us as users and consumers.”

Today, YouTube is the biggest streamer on TVs — and if viewing trends continue on their current trajectory, says Nielsen’s Fuhrer, “there’s a lot more runway there.”

In 2016, Nielsen adopted a new methodology for measuring viewing on TV that encompassed streaming. And it found that while Netflix represented half of streaming, YouTube was in second place. “We thought, ‘This can’t be right. YouTube can’t be this big on TV,’” Fuhrer recalls.

Then came a tipping point: In the summer of 2022, YouTube passed Netflix on TV viewing in the U.S. for the first time, per Nielsen. And it’s held the lead for the past two years. In January 2025, YouTube had 10.8% share on TVs, with Netflix following at 8.6%. YouTube’s TV audience for a long time has been the most diverse from an age perspective and with its broad range of content has “an amazing ability to engage every ethnicity,” says Fuhrer.

Nielsen Total TV and Streaming Snapshot (Viewing Share on TVs, January 2025)

When YouTube began to focus on boosting its share of living-room viewing about a decade ago, it saw there were “pockets of content of watch time that we weren’t serving,” says Christian Oestlien, director of product management at YouTube. Translation: traditional linear TV, and sports in particular. Oestlien led the team that launched YouTube TV in early 2017, combining the dizzyingly vast array of content on core YouTube with the likes of ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and more, so “you’re getting this really complete, one-stop experience,” he says.

Will the Super Bowl one day be streaming on YouTube? “We would love that. Someday,” says Mary Ellen Coe, YouTube’s chief business officer. “A few contracts need to expire, though.”

YouTube has enjoyed a steady growth trajectory. But YouTube and Google have become so big and powerful that U.S. regulators are trying to rein them in. In January 2023, the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing Google of illegally monopolizing the ad-tech market. According to the suit, big advertisers and agencies that want to buy inventory on “the market-leading YouTube website” generally are forced to use Google’s ad tools, reinforcing the company’s “monopolistic grip.” Google has responded that the DOJ is attempting “to pick winners and losers in the highly competitive advertising technology sector.”

How the DOJ’s ad-tech case will play out under the Trump administration is uncertain. For now, Sean Downey, president of Google’s advertising business for the Americas and global partners, tells advertisers that it’s business as usual. “We tell them we’re going to follow that legal process, and whatever remedies come out, we will adhere to,” he says. “In the meantime, we can drive tremendous value for you on the platform.”

In 2017, YouTube faced another crisis in its advertising business after revelations that the platform ran ads in videos with hate speech. It also came to light that YouTube ads appeared with videos that attracted child predators. That prompted major advertisers including Walmart, PepsiCo, AT&T and Chase to freeze spending on YouTube. In response, YouTube moved to tighten controls over how it places ads to ensure they’re adjacent to “brand-safe” content, and it set new restrictions on creator eligibility for revenue sharing.

But that led some YouTubers to complain they were being unfairly deprived of ad-revenue income. Some dubbed it an “adpocalypse” that cut into their earnings.

“That was a crucible moment for YouTube,” Mohan says. “It was an existential threat to our business. It eroded the trust of advertisers. And our creators were really worried.” Mohan was in charge of implementing the advertiser-friendly policies at the time. “We did it slowly but surely. But it takes a lot to build that trust back up.”

To Mohan, YouTube has an opportunity to grow its already massive viewing numbers, given that the platform still only represents roughly 10% of total time spent watching TV in the U.S. “Increasingly people — especially young people — when they turn on their television screens, they’re turning on YouTube.”

A big focus for YouTube in 2025 and beyond is artificial intelligence. The company has made significant investments over the years in AI-based technology for video recommendations and Content ID, its copyright-detection system. Last year it rolled out AI-enabled features for YouTube Shorts, including Dream Screen, which generates images and video backgrounds. Mohan predicts AI will turbocharge YouTube’s creator economy, expanding the creative possibilities.

But it’s a fraught topic, given Hollywood’s fears about AI encroaching on its intellectual property. YouTube has pledged that it will build “responsible AI.” In December, the company announced a partnership with CAA to let actors and other talent identify and take down AI-generated fakes of themselves uploaded to the video platform.

“I believe that AI is going to enhance human creativity, not replace it, and that is both the opportunity as well as the challenge in the next few years,” Mohan says.

Back at the New Orleans convention center, Mohan reiterates that he sees his job as going the extra mile to build the best possible stage for creators of all stripes — whether that’s Sean Evans, MrBeast, Disney or the NFL — to promote and monetize their productions. “And then,” he says, “we get out of the way.”

Set Production:  Brook Dengler; Grooming:  Hiroko Claus