As CEO, Neal Mohan brought the NFL to YouTube. Now his sights are set on AI.

• Neal Mohan became YouTube's new chief earlier this year.
• With NFL Sunday Ticket, Mohan is betting YouTube can transform how people watch TV.
• The video streamer will zero in on making content creation even easier in 2024.
• Read more from BI's Transforming Business series.

Neal Mohan was standing center stage at the Lincoln Center's David Geffen Hall in New York this May when it sank in that YouTube had transformed the way we watch TV.

Dressed in a dark-gray suit and a white shirt without a tie, he beamed as he looked out to an audience of hundreds of familiar faces.

Mohan had recently been appointed chief executive of YouTube, a company that was once his client, long before Google bought it. In the mid-2000s, when Mohan was leading strategy for the adtech company DoubleClick, he'd often visit the video startup at its tiny office above a pizza parlor in downtown San Mateo, California. Even then, the company was growing like a weed.

"They would always talk to me about, 'Hey, can you make sure the DoubleClick systems keep up? We're going to start monetizing through ads, but look at all this viewer growth we're experiencing,'" Mohan told Business Insider.

Mohan had something of a Midas touch. Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in 2007; it became a linchpin for the company's now $224 billion advertising business. And YouTube, which became part of Google in 2006, isn't just the internet's go-to for videos — it's dominating the living room, too.

Mohan's audience at YouTube's annual Brandcast event last May represented all the constituents that had helped it get there: colleagues, creators, advertisers, and media partners. Mohan used Brandcast — YouTube's version of TV upfronts, where networks showcase their upcoming programming to advertisers — to tout that YouTube had become the No. 1 streaming platform on TV screens in the US.

"It was really that moment in time where I felt like the conversation had shifted," Mohan said. "It was not about what is this digital upstart coming to the television upfronts? It was like, oh wow, YouTube is the anchor of this conversation."

NFL Sunday Ticket is transforming TV watching

It's been a year of milestones for YouTube, crowned by the launch of its partnership with the NFL to exclusively broadcast Sunday Ticket football. Mohan described Sunday Ticket as another example of how YouTube is transforming how people watch TV.

He recalled the minutes after he came offstage with the popular science YouTube creator Mark Rober at the NFL owners' meeting earlier this year. Rober was swarmed by the owners' children and grandchildren, who were clamoring for autographs and selfies with the YouTuber. In Mohan's mind, the moment encapsulated YouTube's ability to integrate live sports with its creators and their audiences.

"When a young person turns on the TV, they're not making a distinction between what is creator-generated, what is traditional-media-generated, what's linear, what's live — everything from a four-hour live NFL game to a 42-second short and everything in between is what they expect to watch on the living-room screen," Mohan said.

To its credit, he added, the NFL saw that as well. "They saw that they wanted to reach the younger fan," Mohan said. "The place to do that was YouTube."

The NFL said in September that YouTube's Sunday Ticket package already had more subscribers than it did last year on DirecTV, its former home of more than 20 years.

AI-powered content creation

As YouTube has evolved, viewers have become less passive than the couch potatoes of old. In a survey conducted by YouTube and Ipsos in May 2022, 85% of Gen Z respondents said they'd posted a video online. TikTok may have led the short-form vertical-video trend, but YouTube was quick out of the gate with Shorts. This fall, YouTube said Shorts averaged 70 billion views daily and had reached 2 billion logged-in users monthly.

Looking to 2024, Mohan is betting that newly released tools like Dream Screen, which lets creators add AI-generated backgrounds to Shorts, and its YouTube Create mobile production app, will encourage more content creation.

"This is where our investment in AI is going to come in, using AI to harness and to enable human creativity," Mohan said. "That's a really big part of our vision."

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