YouTube partners with the biggest movie channels, content platforms, and sports icons in the world. (NFL, anyone?) But, Chief Business Officer Mary Ellen Coe is crystal clear on who the real stars—and power players— are on the largest streaming site in the world: Creators.

Whether using AI to generate new features like dubbing or multi-language scripts or watching what their fans share and creating content angled to the viewer, the creators are “the studios of the future,” says Coe. 

“They are multi-talented,” Coe said from the Signal 2024 stage in Cinncinati, Ohio. “We think about them as a whole independent industry.”

You can hear more from the conversation between Coe and Signal 360’s John Battelle in the video below or read our lightly edited transcript.

 

TRANSCRIPT

John Battelle
Please join me in welcoming Mary Ellen Coe, the Chief Business Officer of YouTube.

So you have a big job. YouTube’s a big place.

Mary Ellen Coe
It is a big place. It was a small place with big reach.

I remember covering the industry when Google bought YouTube. I think I wrote a blog post saying, this was a really bad idea, and Google totally overpaid. So I nailed it. Google paid in ’06 about a billion dollars or so for YouTube. Just a bunch of user-generated content and a huge number of lawsuits, right from intellectual property owners. Yeah, a big company owns it, now we can go after them. But it seemed to have worked out. Let’s start with some data, some metrics. YouTube is so big and there’s so many different parts to it. Can you give us kind of the scene from space, how big is the audience? How do the product lines break down?

First of all, I’m really exciting to be here. And YouTube is big from a reach global platform, we have over 2 billion, several billion logged in, monthly active users. That results in billions of hours of watch time on a daily basis, billions of impressions on a daily basis. We’re in over 100 countries and localized in 80 languages. How do we break that down? We talk about YouTube main so that’s the core YouTube experience, and users have a choice. You can watch it with an ad-supported context, or you can have an Ads free experience, which is YouTube Premium. And YouTube premium now is over 100 million subscribers globally. That’s our last reported number. YouTube Premium also has a music component to it, over 2 billion views of music videos a day.

A day.

Yes. A really robust platform for music artists as well. Then in the US, only us, we have YouTube TV, which is a subscription, a paid MVPD, where you can see linear networks and local content. You can also listen to podcasts. We have an incredible podcast corpus now, and the world’s largest corpus of music content.

There aren’t many platforms that can say they have several billion logged in active users, which is pretty extraordinary, and you’re still just a tiny little division of this other company. I asked you this before, and I think you know it bears asking you in front of everybody, because I find it hard to define streaming. Streaming to some people it means, the new streamers. To others, it’s just a catch all for every possible kind of digital or connected television. Clearly, YouTube is the largest streaming television video service. But how do you define streaming?

Streaming is very dynamic, very competitive. We think about, there’s traditional streaming like Disney+ or Netflix. Then when we think about our ecosystem, there’s also Spotify, and then social digital players like Reels or

TikTok as an example. What we ultimately think about is, how do we ensure that, you know, the consumer can find the content they’re interested in and make it easy and accessible? Nielsen just reported the numbers yesterday, we are now the largest streamer in the United States, 17 months running, so about a year and a half, with close to 10% market share. Ultimately what we’re trying to do is make it easier for the viewer to find what they want to watch, what they want to watch how they want to watch it, to break those kind of boundaries of what is a definition.

YouTube finds itself in that interesting position of being both a competitor and a partner, depending on how you’re thinking about the point of view of the consumer. You want that 10% to go to 11, 12 and 13, like John Moeller wants to go from 17 to 16 to 15. But you also with YouTube TV, for example, you’re partners because you carry the services of the other streamers. Right?

Yes. For example, Netflix is a very close partner. They use the platform extensively. For example, they’re on Shorts. They were an early entrant into Shorts as a way to access their fans. They post a lot of content to reach their fans, a lot of their original content. We think of them as frenemies. In fact, creators and media companies, we have significant partnerships, whether it be Disney or Paramount or Warner Brothers Discovery, very close partnerships with all of the media cos, sports leagues and artists. We think about that corpus broadly.

These new entrants, many of them have gotten religion around advertising. I guess is the way to put it.

It’s a good place to be.

Netflix, Amazon. We’ll be hearing from Amazon later today. You always had it. How do you differentiate, if you’re talking to, a room full of potential and real brand advertisers who are your partners? How do you differentiate your offerings from these new entrants in the advertising world?

We start with and it’s the place you and I started, global reach. Our reach and global footprint is unrivaled, and that’s really important to us. We talk about what’s on the world is what’s on YouTube, and the localization and really staying integral to the fabric of these local markets is really essential, and that’s important to our partners is that we’re showing up on a global basis. We’re a technology company. We spend a significant time innovating the viewer experience. And I saw Tim up earlier. Our NFL partnership is a great example.

When we acquired the rights to Sunday Ticket, we spent a lot of time with our product leadership on how do we really innovate the viewer experience. That had been a property that had been held by DirecTV for a very significant period of time, and we wanted to make sure that we were showing up for viewers in a way that was a really exciting experience. So we launched Multiview, which just has been incredibly compelling for our users. You have chat functionality in terms of comments. You can integrate with your mobile device and be able to chat with others and comment throughout the game. We have live shopping for merchandise, etc, so that viewer experience is always very central to how we’re innovating.

Finally, and I think what people think of as our North Star, our creators. We talk about user-generated content, these creators are really the studios of the future. They are multi talented. We think about them as a whole independent industry. They’re doing writing and production and scripted content and using AI in ways that will really push creativity and boundaries of creativity forward.

I’ve always thought that was a fascinating journey from the videos that you saw on YouTube before the acquisition, to the growth of it, which was extraordinary, to the fact that I’m going to guess, and maybe you can validate that influencers and creators probably have a much bigger share of voice than traditional media content.

Absolutely. People will say, “Oh, you know, how big are these creators really?” And the numbers really speak for themselves. Sean Evans as an example, who has the show, “Hot Ones,” over 300 episodes, cumulative, several billions of impressions or of content. “Good Mythical Morning,” Rhett and Link, they garner for each of their programs, double the audience for the 18- to 29- year old demo of late night TV. These creators have really massive followings and very loyal fan bases. We talk about that engagement. There’s this co creation element to it, yeah?

YouTube turns 20 next year, 20 years old. So thinking about our theme and some of the stories that we’ve heard throughout this morning. Is there a point in the history of the company, over 20 years, where there was an opportunity or an obstacle that was a that opened a door to our theme to market growth or value creation.

You started the conversation by remembering we were sued for copyright infringement. This was a pretty existential challenge to the platform, and how do we think about maintaining the rights of copyholders? We talk about this today, the elements of control and attribution and monetization. That really was the genesis of Content ID, which is a technology and a set of tools, a suite of tools that were developed to protect and help rights holders control and and track their content, and to make sure that if you were a rights holder, you could either, and your content was uploaded, you could either block that content, you could track it, or you could monetize it. As an example, in 2022 this is the largest and most sophisticated rights management system globally. In 2022 we paid out $9 billion to rights holders, who wanted to claim their content, and that includes artists and media codes, etc. It’s created a significant ecosystem where people and rights holders can make choices to reach just incredibly scaled audiences. It has creates this virtuous circle.

The scale of that is, when it started I think there were a lot of people, industry was, “This is going to be impossible. It’s just too complicated.”

A lot of engineers felt that way.

A lot of engineers, I spoke to many of them, and you guys pulled it off. I’m going a little bit off script here, but it strikes me that we’re at a similar moment with AI.

We are at a very similar moment.

There was news just this week about some of the AI large language models using YouTube videos to train their models. Now, Google’s in this business and has the rights by its policies, and the consent that it’s gotten from its users. It can train its models on YouTube videos. But you have competitors doing it.

Our CEO, Neal Mohan, has spoken with Bloomberg very openly about this. We have terms and conditions. You are not allowed to scrape YouTube. That is really important for our Creators rights. So we take that very, very seriously, spending quite a bit of time with the music industry on the principles of control and attribution and monetization, because we really want to rights holders to respect their rights, and that’s something very important. So we will work on what is the content ID for an AI era, and that’s work that’s going on now.

So when is the lawsuit dropping against OpenAI?

Can’t comment on that.

I’m sorry. I had to say it.

I have no unique knowledge.

Given how large that multi billion logged in audience is, and how good Google is at paying attention to signals to data, you must have some consumer insights. What are you learning about, how people are using your services and consuming content.

We talked about the global platform. We take that responsibility very seriously. This is a year where more than 50% of the world is voting in a democratic election. Which is significant. I had watched some of the earlier speakers talked about gaming. Minecraft as an example is one of the fascinating. 1.5 trillion views of Minecraft content around the world. So if you actually took each of those views and just translated into a second of watch time. That’s over 30,000 years of watch time on Minecraft. So gaming continues to be an incredibly important area for a broad array of consumers.

Another area that I love. We live stream Coachella, which used to be just this little event in the desert, probably 125,000 people could attend. It is become a global phenomenon. We stream it live. On average, about 50 million views. The really fascinating thing 50% of those views come from outside of the US, and 50% of those around the living room, which is our fastest growing surface, really important insight. We look at K-pop as an example. So Gangnam Style, which was our first video, first to a billion views, and that is now up to 5 billion views. It’s our fifth most watched video. But now you take Blackpink and some of the other K-pop bands, they have the largest fandoms around the world, 197 million fan followers. These are really big trends, and they are global trends which are fun to watch.

Are there any myths or sort of misconceptions about YouTube that you want to correct for the record?

I think the cat video.

No, no. I watch all my cat videos. I watch them all on Reels.

That makes me feel better. I think this idea that what is quality content, and this has been an ongoing debate in the industry for decades now, and we continue to purport that content is the in the eye of the audience, and ultimately, people choose the content that they find engaging and relevant. And these creators are the studios of the future. They are very sophisticated. The agility with which they’re innovating with new tools, with AI for dubbing and multi languages, seeing exponential growth in their audiences.

I use the phrase co-creation. One of the things our fans love, and the creators are really adept at, is following what their fans are sharing with them that is most relevant. And they literally create the unscripted content to be able to follow their fans. It creates this relationship with the audience that’s incredibly unique, and I think that’s not as well known as many people who use the platform.

I made a little joke about Reels before, but you have Shorts and you’ve mentioned Shorts. I got pretty excited when Shorts came out. Actually, I had a company that made short videos. YouTube and Shorts is pretty cool, but can you tell me a little bit more about this? It’s a new surface for YouTube, and I think you have a video. Should we set that up?

We have an award for creators when they get to 10 million subscribers. It’s a very prestigious award. And this is Adam W, and I’m presenting Adam W, he’s a Short creator with his Diamond Award, and he scripted this video.

[Video Plays]

That tells it a pretty extraordinary story in under a minute.

He’s incredible. I was really nervous to film that, but he does that all the time, so that was good.

Staying and ending with Shorts, how do I succeed in that new format like that as a partner, as a marketer?

Yes, so explosive growth in Shorts, 2 billion logged in, and 70 billion views a day. We actually have seen and P&G is a great example of this. Olay did a really wonderful shorts campaign that lifted brand search by over 20% so the integration with brands and creators is really just taking off in a really significant way. We see it as a fantastic surface for brands to integrate into.

I’m sorry we had to run out of time. Hopefully we can have you back sometime. Thank you so much. Mary Ellen.

Thank you for having me.