YouTube CEO Neal Mohan today is out with an overview of “big bets for 2025,” with this year marking the site’s 20th birthday.
Notably, we learned that “TV has surpassed mobile and is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S. (by watch time)” as of December 2024.
Viewers are watching, on average, over 1B hours of YouTube content on TVs daily
This “new” television experience is said to be “interactive and includes things like Shorts (yes, people watch them on TVs), podcasts, and live streams, right alongside the sports, sitcoms and talk shows people already love.” To that end, YouTube will further improve the television app in 2025:
- YouTube is experimenting with a “Watch With” feature that lets Creators “provide live commentary and real time reactions to games and events.” Testing is already underway with NFL content and will expand to other sports and types of content in 2025.
- “We’ll continue to improve fan-favorite YouTube TV features, like Key Plays and multiview, and bring new benefits to YouTube Premium subscribers.”
On the monetization front:
- “Last year, more than 50% of channels earning five figures or more (USD) on YouTube made money from sources other than ads & YouTube Premium.”
- “Shopping recommendations are also becoming a key revenue stream for many creators…”
- “And last year we saw more than a 40% increase in channel memberships.”
Meanwhile, with podcasts (“most frequently used service for listening to podcasts in the U.S.“), YouTube this year is going to “roll out more tools to support podcasters, improve monetization for creators, and make it even easier to discover podcasts.”
Communities will be available for more Creators this year, while Hype (paid watcher-driven rallying/boosting for up-and-coming Creators) is coming to more markets.
On the AI front, YouTube says Creators are “most excited about the ways AI can help with their bread-and-butter production.” Meanwhile, the latest Veo 2 video generation model will “soon” be integrated into Dream Screen.
Auto dubbing, which offers one-click video translation into multiple languages, will be available for all Creators in the YouTube Partner Program “later this month.”
For videos with dubbed audio, more than 40% of the total watch time comes from viewers choosing to listen in a dubbed language.
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