Rene's Top 5 on YouTube: Year in Review

The partnership I just mentioned — that YouTube and creators succeed better together — saw one of its biggest reaffirmations ever this year as the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) was broadened to include Shorts, and raised up to allow for earlier access to fan funding and shopping.

Shorts monetization has been a huge challenge for the industry. From just… nothing in some regions to unscalable, capped funds and incentive programs in others. Unlike long-form monetizing which is mature and expansive with multiple ads per video, Shorts are still relatively new and there are multiple Shorts per ad. But by making Shorts part of YPP, providing all the support and other options and benefits that come with YPP, and sharing ad-revenue with creators, as Shorts monetization matures and grows, YouTube and creators will benefit and succeed together.

There have been some challenges this year as well. An update intended to simplify ad-friendly guidelines around profanity resulted in an unexpected amount of icons to flip from green (full ads) to yellow (limited ads) for an unexpected amount of creators, and the policy team sprinted to re-update it. To combat scams and spam, links in Shorts descriptions and comments were rendered unclickable, which impacted some creators with heavily web-based business models. (Though Prominent Channel Links, Related Video Links, and Shopping were ramped up to try and mitigate some of that.) Some channels faced issues with invalid traffic (inauthentic ‘clicks’ on ads), which affected ad revenue, or reused content (not original or significantly transformed videos), which affected YPP status.

Creator experience is something YouTube takes incredibly seriously. The teams all spend an enormous amount of time working towards the best possible outcomes, and there’s always more we can and should be doing. Not just for the most or majority of creators but for the many different types of creators, and we’re continuing to double-down on that.

Which is one of the many reasons earlier access to fan funding — Channel Memberships, Super Chats/Stickers, and Super Thanks — and to Shopping was so important to get into the hands of creators as well. It lets those who best nurture and connect with their audiences receive support directly from those audiences. Not every channel or topic will thrive best purely on advertising revenue. And we’ve seen many creators — and not just gamers! — succeed brilliantly through community building and direct support. Now creators can start earlier and, hopefully, thrive and grow even faster.

For a decade or more, AI has been coming but never quite arriving. That is, until roughly now. Ish. YouTube has been using AI, especially machine learning, for what feels like several ages of the Internet already, to help with everything from discovery to trust and safety. But this last year saw a Cambrian explosion of generative AI — where the vague promises of quasi sci-fi fan-fic vaporware finally, rapidly started coalescing into a still very much nascent but usable, verging on useful, reality.

Google and YouTube want to approach AI boldly but responsibly. Google announced Bard, and just now booster-packed it with Gemini. That conversational, large language model technology will no doubt level up the experience and capabilities of many things at the company, including what we announced at Made on YouTube this year: Dream Screen, which will let you turn almost anything you can type into a still or video background for your Shorts. Dream Track, which is a very-small-actually-kinda-tiny experiment that will turn anything you can type into 30-second song that sounds uncannily like the participating artists. Inspiration, which will help you find ideas and even generate outlines for future videos based on current audience affinity.

If the first generation of these products seemed stuck in the user experience paradigm of… Zork. But these newer ones are starting to meet people where we are — humming, doodling, filming, productivity…ing.

Some creators worry that AI will replace us. Faceless “educational” videos first, then full-on fake humans doing everything we can do, only at the matchless velocity and volume of GenAI. But other creators are embracing — bear-hugging! — GenAI as a way to make actual humans even more matchless. GenAI is already being used to produce outlines and storyboards, title and thumbnail concepts, to punch up scripts and paint-in fixes for video, to rough-cut a-roll and insert voice-cloned voice-overs over b-roll, and to discover new insights in analytics and comments.

And it’s easy to see why. From the very beginning, YouTube solved for distribution. As a single, solitary creator, almost anyone, almost anywhere, could upload a video and reach the world in a way that used to require a Hollywood studio, radio network, record label, or television channel. No more gatekeepers. But production was never similarly solved for. A single, solitary creator wanting to make a video with 300 doppelgangers running up a hill, or to host an explainer of a starship while walking around that starship, or to produce a weekly animated series, still required the resources and funding of a full-on Hollywood special effects house.

Until now. Maybe. It’s still such early days. But maybe, just maybe, GenAI will, somewhere between soon and eventually, let a single, solitary creator truly compete with the biggest production houses on the planet, based on the quality of ideas, the excellence of execution, and the care for audience — based on vision and voice — with truly anyone, anywhere.