YouTube’s Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan offers an inside look at this year’s new products, tools, and features for our creators, viewers, and partners. He says, “Last year, I launched an Innovation series to give you an inside look into how our teams were working to redefine the video experience in 2021 and beyond. And it was quite a year for innovation at YouTube. We refreshed how viewers engage with content, from improving core experiences like search and the infrastructure that powers the platform to advancing across apps and formats like YouTube TV, YouTube Shorts and YouTube Music. We also introduced new ways for creators to make money and brought more choice for parents to guide their families’ experiences. And along the way, we partnered with creators to empower them to do what they do best.”
Watch the video for a quick summary here:
For Creators:
YouTube creators are the heart and soul of the platform, and we want them to always be able to fulfill their most ambitious creative goals. To give them every opportunity possible, we’ll continue to invest across our multiple formats: Shorts, Live, and video on demand (VOD). And in the months ahead, we will bring even more engagement and monetization options across all three formats.
We also launched the YouTube Shorts Fund last year to start rewarding creators for their work. While this was just a first step, we’re already helping a new generation of creative entrepreneurs. In fact, over 40 percent of creators who got a check from the Fund last year weren’t previously monetizing their content on YouTube. In the coming months, we’ll start to test other ways to make money on Shorts — like exploring new ways for Shorts creators to build branded content through BrandConnect, integrating fan-funded features like Super Chat into Shorts, and bringing the ability to shop directly from a Short.
We also launched the YouTube Shorts Fund last year to start rewarding creators for their work. While this was just a first step, we’re already helping a new generation of creative entrepreneurs. In fact, over 40 percent of creators who got a check from the Fund last year weren’t previously monetizing their content on YouTube. In the coming months, we’ll start to test other ways to make money on Shorts — like exploring new ways for Shorts creators to build branded content through BrandConnect, integrating fan-funded features like Super Chat into Shorts, and bringing the ability to shop directly from a Short.
For Viewers:
Live is another area that will see progress this year to build on our momentum — daily live watch-time more than tripled between January 2020 and December 2021. We’ll introduce collaborative livestreaming, which (you guessed it!) allows creators to go live together and create even more interactive streams for their audiences. One of the biggest questions livestreaming creators have is “What do I talk about?” The ability to “go live together” should hopefully open up streams to more casual conversation and interactions with other creators, making it easier and more fun to go live. Creators will also be able to grow their network and reach, and their communities will have a chance to interact and build connections.
For Partners:
One of the most anticipated opportunities we’ll bring to our brands this year is Shopping. This new experience taps into the deep trust creators have built with their communities to help our partners expand into the booming world of e-commerce. We’re thinking about shoppable videos, Live Shopping, and, more broadly, how shopping appears across the app. With shoppable videos — like this partnership for Black-owned Friday — users can shop tagged items in their favorite creators’ videos.
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