YouTube shares 2024 priorities as YouTube TV hits 8 million subscribers

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan today shared what the video service is focusing on in 2024. At a high-level, it’s AI, elevating creators, safety, and the “next frontier” of the living room and subscriptions.

As it has for the past few years, the service is emphasizing how people are “watching YouTube the way we used to sit down together for traditional TV shows – on the biggest screen in the home with friends and family.” Notable stats here include:

• “Viewers globally now watch more than 1 billion hours on average of YouTube content on their TVs every day.”
• “In the last three years, the number of top creators that received the majority of their watchtime on the big screen increased more than 400%.”

Besides Music and Premium having 100 million subscribers, YouTube TV has more than 8 million. The cord-cutting service reported 5 million in 2022, and was said to be Google’s fastest-growing product last year. YouTube hopes to offer “a best in class experience for subscriptions and YouTube in the living room” in 2024.

On the AI front, YouTube wants to make sure people have “tools that will push the boundaries of creative expression” and let more people create by reducing complexity. This includes Dream Screen’s AI-generated backgrounds for YouTube Shorts and Dream Tracks on the music front. 

Shorts is averaging over 70 billion daily views, and the number of channels uploading Shorts has grown 50% year over year.

Meanwhile, YouTube says its creators are “redefining the future of the entertainment industry with top-notch storytelling” that goes beyond user-generated content. Mohan goes further, calling them “next-generation studios.” 

Being a creator is a full time job with an international audience, but most governments don’t account for creators in their labor data. We believe creators should be recognized for their work and creators at the top of their game should be acknowledged in key industry forums.

On the monetary side:

• “Today more than 3 million channels are in the YouTube Partner Program (YPP)…”
• “YPP has paid out more than any other creator monetization platform, and we paid over $70 billion to creators, artists, and media companies over the last three years.”
• “The number of creators using memberships increased more than 50% last year, and creators are seeing the impact of fan funding.”

In terms of platform and user safety, there’s a focus on:

• “Our business as a streaming service relies not just on engagement, but on giving viewers and advertisers confidence that they can count on us to deliver high quality content. Protecting the creator economy is foundational to everything we do, and it’s good for business.”
• “It’s important that we create a healthy online experience for kids.”
• “Another way we uphold our responsibility is connecting people with high quality information.”