Youtube’s 2023 Priorities, as its new lead Neal puts in his letter

Supporting the success of creators, building for the YouTube of the future, and protecting the YouTube community, Neal Mohan, YouTube’s new lead addresses YouTube’s priorities for 2023. Neal expresses his excitement about taking the lead position on YouTube. Looking ahead to what’s next for YouTube, Neal says he is confident about putting their full energy into what matters most for creators and viewers. 

Neal gave an update on Youtube’s key priorities: 

1. Supporting the success of creators, 
2. Building for the YouTube of the future, 
3. Protecting the YouTube community.

Supporting the Success of Creators

Neal Mohan, Youtube’s new leader said that “Creators and artists are the heart of YouTube, and I’ll continue to put them first. In today’s challenging macroeconomic climate, we’re offering opportunities to grow a business on our platform”. 

YouTube’s creative ecosystem supported more than two million jobs in 2021 in Brazil, Canada, the United States, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, France, Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, and Turkey combined, according to research by Oxford Economics.

Here’s how Youtube will work to support the success of creators across the platform this year:

• Giving creators more ways to make money. YouTube helps creators build deep relationships with audiences and offers them more tools to make a living doing what they love. 
• Providing more opportunities for creators outside of ads by expanding their subscription business, investing in shopping, and continually improving Youtube’s paid digital goods offerings. These options for creators make an impact. 
• Listening to creators. Neal is looking forward to meeting with even more creators in person and hearing how Youtube can support them on the platform. Creator feedback is a key part of how Youtube develops products, like a feature that lets creators reach new audiences by adding language tracks to their videos. We’ve also heard from creators about the importance of broadening accessibility for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Thanks to long-term investments in machine learning, Youtube now provides automatic captions in more languages.
• Youtube has seen how gifted memberships have connected creators with their communities, and this year they are expanding to mobile. 
• Youtube has a vision of gaming videos. Gaming streams bring lots of highlights and memorable reactions that viewers love to clip. Youtube will enable viewers to remix clips into Shorts and add features that make it easy to recompose the best gaming content to Shorts. 

Building for the YouTube of the Future

Youtube is investing in the features and experiences that will make YouTube a great home for viewers and creators now and in the future, from doubling down on streaming and connected TV to unlocking unparalleled creative potential. Here are a few areas Youtube is particularly focused on:

Viewers: The best streaming and connected TV experience– bringing the best of YouTube to the living room – the creators people love, the streaming they want, and the useful features they’ve come to expect from YouTube.

• Youtube has recently adapted the mobile experience of Shorts to a TV-friendly format  
• Youtube launched Primetime Channels, a new way for users to watch content from their favourite streaming services on the YouTube app.
• Youtube expanded its partnership with the NFL which will help make it the best place to watch football. Subscribers will see features from YouTube TV – like the ability to watch key plays – added to the main YouTube app. And creators will connect with sports fans through coverage and commentary. Sunday Ticket will also come with ways to engage with other fans, including comments, chats, and polls. 
• Coming later this year to YouTube TV: a new feature that lets viewers watch multiple games at once.

Creators: unlocking creativity across formats. Today’s creators are continually testing the boundaries of expression. YouTube offers the biggest creative canvas of any platform and is continually expanding it. Youtube is making creation across formats more amazing so creators have new ways to express themselves and build audiences.

• YouTube Shorts is giving creators greater reach – Shorts is now averaging over 50 billion daily views. 
• One area creators are increasingly interested in is podcasting. YouTube is now the second most popular destination for listening to podcasts according to Edison. This year Youtube is making it even easier for creators and artists to showcase their podcasts on it. New features in YouTube Studio make it easier to publish podcasts, and it will also start bringing both audio and video-first podcasts to the millions of people who use YouTube Music in the United States, with more regions to come. And later this year, RSS integration will offer podcasters another way to upload their shows to YouTube and give users more listening options.
• This year, Youtube will roll out a creation tool that lets creators record a Short in a side-by-side layout with both Shorts and YouTube videos so they can easily add their take on a trend or join in with reactions.
• Youtube is taking the time to develop the emerging AI features possible with thoughtful guardrails. It will roll out tools for creators as well as the protections to embrace this technology responsibly shortly. 

Protecting the YouTube Community

Youtube is investing in the teams, technology, and systems that ensure creators and viewers have a safe experience on its platform.

• Youtube is always looking for more ways to make it easier to find family-friendly videos through YouTube Kids. It built YouTube Kids to create an environment for kids to explore their interests and give parents the tools to customise the experience for their families. 
• Youtube has also developed protections for people under 18, like defaulting uploads to private. 
• Youtube is looking forward to making the videos kids explore to be enriched along with the safety factor. While no system is perfect, it has put extensive resources into creating multiple layers of protection and lifting high-quality content that helps kids learn and grow.
• Youtube will also continue to engage with policymakers to share their perspective on policies that impact their creators and artists. Governments around the globe are updating laws and introducing bills that will shape the digital environment and Neal says that Youtube is aligned with government officials in wanting to create a safe environment online that also allows for a plurality of voices to be heard. 

YouTube’s power comes from a shared sense of community that is more than the sum of its parts. The magic of its platform is that creators, artists, advertisers, and viewers can come together to do something amazing. This is what motivates Neal and everyone at YouTube to do their best work every single day. Hopefully, Youtube will continue to do so as they work to make their platform an even better place to share stories, learn new skills, access information, and build community. Because as Neal Mohan says, the best of YouTube is yet to come!