What Is YouTube’s Dominance Doing to Us? We Asked Its C.E.O.

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The Interview

What Is YouTube’s Dominance Doing to Us? We Asked Its C.E.O.

Credit...

Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times

The Interview

What Is YouTube’s Dominance Doing to Us? We Asked Its C.E.O.

Credit...

Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times

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By

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

March 28, 2026

YouTube is now the leading way Americans watch video. Its audience is young; an astonishing

90 percent of American teenagers

are on the platform. YouTube TV is bigger than many cable operators. (Since last year, the main way YouTube has been consumed in the United States is actually on connected television.)

YouTube has changed not only what we watch — think of content creators like Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, and podcasters like Joe Rogan — but also how we watch it, with interactive features part of the platform’s allure.

And, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. Which is why I wanted to sit down with YouTube’s chief executive, Neal Mohan, who has led the company since 2023 and overseen its rapid growth. The platform’s rise hasn’t come without controversy. Just this week, a jury in California found YouTube, alongside Meta, negligent for harming a teenager’s mental health through its addictive features. That verdict, which YouTube said it would appeal, came down after Mohan and I talked, but our lengthy conversation did cover YouTube’s impact on children — and on us all. You can read that conversation here, or you can watch a longer version, of course, on YouTube.

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I want to start with a statistic. MrBeast, the biggest content creator on YouTube, said that humanity now spends 2 percent of its waking hours on YouTube. Is the goal to make it 3 percent?

I know Jimmy very well. He and I have not done that math together. [Laughs] We measure ourselves by this concept of whether viewers, all of us, the two billion people that come to YouTube every single day, are satisfied by their experience. And we

have

grown. We’re the No. 1 streamer. We’re an incredibly large podcast platform. I will watch this conversation on YouTube.

Yes, what used to be an audio podcast is now a video podcast. This is the way to gain new audiences, because everyone seems to be on the platform now. What is it that you think makes shows grow? I mean, how do I make this a hit, other than grabbing a chair and bashing you over the head with it?

[Laughs] It’s very, very simple. The people that are watching you on a television screen or on their mobile phones, the one thing they can suss out really quickly is if it’s truly authentic. That’s what comes through for the successful creators.

You recently have had several major podcasters leave YouTube for Netflix — shows like “The Breakfast Club,” “My Favorite Murder.” Meta just announced that they are interested in luring some of your creators away. Apple is now talking about getting into the video podcast business more aggressively. They’re taking the things that you built and saying, Come over here, the water’s warm.

I’d say a couple of things about that. First, it is flattering that they see us as the center of culture. But when I speak to our creators — and I speak to them several times a week — what they always tell me is that no matter what they look to do, they understand that YouTube is their home. There would be no “Beast Games” if there wasn’t MrBeast on YouTube. Jimmy knows that. I have not come across YouTubers that have completely yanked their content off YouTube. I can’t imagine why they would do that. And frankly, they’re in a position where they can say no to that, right? Because the nice thing about what they’ve built is that there are other places that are so desperate to work with them that they’ll acquiesce to what our YouTubers ultimately know is the right decision for them in the long term, which is to never leave their home.

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