Big Technology Podcast - How YouTube Shorts Picks Winners — With Todd Sherman

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

Todd Sherman is the product lead for YouTube Shorts. He's also a former group product manager at Twitter and Snap. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a discussion about YouTube's plans for Shorts, how the product works, and how it plans to compete with TikTok. We start with a discussion about whether Twitter bringing back Vine could work. YouTube Shorts are now available on YouTube's TV app, which Sherman discusses as well.

LinkedIn Presents. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation, of the tech world and beyond. There is a lot going on in the social media world in particular. Obviously, Elon Musk is running amok inside Twitter. Snapchat is still trying to find its way on the revenue side though its products doing well and of course the most fascinating battle

is probably between TikTok and YouTube and Instagram when it comes to these short form videos that everybody seems to be interested in building into their product today we have like the perfect person to speak to all three of these issues Todd Sherman is the director of product management at YouTube I'm going to introduce him

or welcome to the show in just a moment but first just at the top If you're listening on Apple podcast or Spotify and are interested in giving us a rating, they really go a long way in helping us get discovered. So five stars on either of those platforms would be particularly helpful. I want to say thank you to everybody who's rated. And with that being said, Todd, welcome to the show. Thanks so much.

Really great to be here with you. Great to have you here. So you were the product manager, director of product management at Twitter, responsible for very interesting product tweets. And, you know, tweets you would think are not really changed over time, but they did change. You know, they included GIFs and stickers and polls. Quote tweets is a very interesting one. And then obviously longer tweets, which was something that you worked on while you were there.

Big question at the start while you were at Twitter. Did you anticipate it going in this direction? You know, I had worked at Twitter from 2014 for onward, like for a couple years, two and a half years or so. And, you know, I joined at a time, like, after they went public. And there were a lot of senior leaders coming in from across the industry that loved Twitter and wanted to help build the future of it. So even when I was there, it was a very dynamic time. And in my time there, Jack sort of came back as CEO. And so when I look back to my time at Twitter and then think about everything since then, it seems like it's always been a pretty dynamic.

place. So, you know, your question is sort of around, like, have I, you know, is it like sort of what I expected? I think that you kind of, you know, having been at Twitter, I think a lot of people have sort of come to expect Twitter to kind of always be at the center of the discussion. And it seems like that's proven true over the last several years as well. Okay. All right, let's move on. So Twitter is also talking about bringing back Vine. I guess it was, Vine was, around when you were there. Is that right? It was, yeah. What do you think about the idea? I mean, did it, do you think they, we're going to get into YouTube stuff in a minute, but do you think they missed this, you know, Pete, there's a famous mean that, you know, Twitter could have been

the original TikTok. Do you think they missed that moment? And, and do you think that they can get back in the game by sort of like resuscitating Vine? You know, short form video has had a really interesting history. And I think in many regards, it all started with Vine. And, and, you know, And when I think about modern short form video now with, you know, TikTok shorts and reels and then you ask sort of how you got here, you know, Vine certainly kicked things off, you know, just to recap like what Vine was for those maybe that weren't very close to it, you know, you had this feed of lots of very short videos, oftentimes like six seconds long and you sort of they're square and you scrolled through them. And a lot of it was comedy. A lot of creative people poured a lot of energy into making fantastic videos. it wasn't powered really by machine learning recommendations. And, you know, the camera was quite innovative because as you pressed your finger on the screen, you could record a segment of video and then you could take your finger off and, like, record more.

So it had like these really mobile native video creation tools. But it was really just the start. If you look at like what happened after Vine, there was a small French app that most people haven't heard of called Mindy. They added music in the creation process. I actually remember when I had my first kid in the hospital. hospital room. I wanted to kind of make a vine. And I was playing like the like the soundtrack for a lion king when they were like, they were like showing like, oh, this is going to be yours. And I like held my

baby up and had my wife take a video of it. But I had to like play that music from some other source. So Mindy added music during the creation process that sync recording. And then it also made it full screen. And so you could see how like they kind of moved it forward. And then musically, they added some things too, right? They added vertical video actions in the player. So you could like something or share. And they also added these pivots where you could see more videos that use the same song, which really spurred a lot of trends. And so I think what's interesting about short form video is that there's been a lot of changes across many apps and many years that eventually led to what we see in like the modern offerings. And so, you know, when Dillian came

about in China, which is, you know, the TikTok of China, it was really at a time when machine and learning recommendations came into their own and really started, they really focused it on short form video. And I think that's what allowed it to become sort of much more mainstream when TikTok, when bite dance acquired musically and then brought TikTok to scale outside of China. And so when I think back to Vine and to your question, I think that there is a lot of nostalgia that I have for Vine. I loved Vine, spent a lot of time on Vine. And if they're talking about bringing it back, you know, I guess the question would be, does that mean you're bringing back the name or are you bringing back the exact product? Because a lot has changed since those earlier

times. And so I'm not sure exactly what their plans are, but I do love Vine. Right. And it is interesting. There was this moment where lots of creators went to Vine and said, listen, we are the ones that are making this app worth downloading and we want a cut of the revenue and sort of never cut them in. And they kind of went to your second employer, which was Snapchat, and started creating on stories. And they created on YouTube instead. And that's the real, the real story of what happened, Devine. I think it wasn't exactly the format. It was the fact that all these creators decided that they weren't getting a piece of the action. They were delivering all the value and they just wanted out. Yeah, you know, I don't know if it was clear at the time about

what it could mean to build a truly sustainable ecosystem. In retrospect, often things become clear. But, you know, when I think about what we're doing with shorts, for example, you know, when you think about an ecosystem, you generally want all the participants to feel like it's worth continuing to stay active, right? And so for, for shorts, you know, we have creators that are pouring their time and energy and passion to making videos. You have viewers that want to watch videos, be entertained, be entertained,

interested in videos and you have advertisers that they have their own goals right they want to further their advertising goals and so you know thinking back to what youtube did for long form video we're trying to do something similar here where we align the incentives between you know creators advertisers and viewers in order to build a self-sustaining ecosystem i don't think it's as clear that that was that could happen in that same way back in the days of vying now yeah i mean maybe if you were standing there at the ground you know there might be some excuse to be made but looking back, it's absolutely what happened. So let's move on to YouTube. Just thinking about the way that shorts came about, from my perspective on the outside, it seems like, you know, TikTok. We had

an episode back, you know, about TikTok about a year ago talking about who TikTok's biggest competitor was. And I thought, okay, maybe it's Facebook. But I guess I actually said YouTube. And I'm curious, like, what's the story that I imagine in my head in terms of when YouTube decided to get into shorts is that it sees TikTok being this very quick growing video watching site? People who created were interested in it, people who were watching loved it. It used a good algorithmic recommendations, which YouTube was getting into. And it became sort of, we need to get a version of this product inside YouTube. where we could lose a lot of ground to TikTok right away. So what is the real story inside YouTube in terms of how that actually happened?

Or maybe that is? Yeah, great question. So I think that even before TikTok was a household name and before musically was acquired, we were interested in short form video. And I think that there, you know, if you look through that sort of narrative of these different apps, kind of increasingly maturing and meeting. user needs. And you were kind of observing that. Like, you know, I was observing that because, you know, I was at Twitter when we had Vaughn and I, I was active on, you know, Mindy and Musically

and these other and Dubsmash and all these other apps. And so if you're like kind of using those apps over time, you can get a sense that it's like maturing to the point where it's like increasingly meeting users needs. And I think there's really two parts to that, right? There's like creator needs, like making it easy for me to make videos and get an audience. And then there's viewer needs of like seeing things I'm interested in videos I value, right? And so as I was involved in that over time, I sort of got the sense that this was increasingly approaching a point where it could become mainstream. Up until that point, it was quite niche, right? And so after I joined YouTube almost five years ago now, I was sort of interested in what short form

video could be like inside of YouTube. And so, you know, we started running some experiments where we took short form videos that were already uploaded to YouTube because, of course, lots of videos of all links are uploaded to YouTube, although most of the ones that people saw at the time were, you know, 10 and 20 minutes long, we started taking those and experimenting with them to see if people would enjoy them. And, you know, early on, we got a signal that the answer was yes, but we also got us sort of understanding of how recommending short form video is just so different from long form video. So, you know, we started running those experiments and convincing ourselves is this worth an area worth investing in because we were able to see how people were engaging

with it. And then, you know, we continue to scale that. And then, you know, TikTok sort of became much more prominent in the world. And I think that only kind of served to validate that there was really like latent demand for this in the world. And we continue to kind of double down on investing in it and really seeking to grow an ecosystem. We took a very like iterative approach, if you will, starting by like, you know, just the consumption experience and then we build the creation tools and we've continued to invest in in all aspects of the product since then. You mentioned that it's different to recommend a short short video versus a long form. Talk a little bit about that.

How was the difference? Yeah, you know, I think that if you think about somebody that's really engaged with YouTube, maybe they're watching, you know, 10, maybe 12, maybe 15 videos that are 10 or 20 minutes long. It's an awful lot of time that they're spending, enjoying content on YouTube. And when you think about that amount of time and then you think about watching short form videos, you just watch so many more videos, right? And to be able to serve users' desire to be entertained or educated or catch up on something new or discover something new, there's sort of an extra onus on making sure that that feed is diverse.

for example, right? Like maybe some people want a very diverse feed that has lots of different types of content. Maybe users want to see content from creators they know, but maybe they also want to discover new things that they didn't even know that they wanted, right? So you sort of have objectives around helping people discover new things and probe their interests. Like maybe you didn't even know you were interested in beekeeping. But if we can find a video that we think is good and put that in front of you in your feed,

then we can help you discover that and connect with that content and broaden your your interest. And so you think about how quickly we need to incorporate your feedback signals, whether they're negative or positive, into subsequent recommendations. All of this is sort of like almost like the feed level perspective. And so in some regards, like, you know, short form video is much more about a feed. You know, creators are still obviously at the center of it, but being able to construct a feed that really aligns with what you're interested in or what you might be interested in is very central to being successful with short form video. And so some of those things are a bit different than recommending, you know, 10 or 15 long form videos compared to

hundreds of short form videos. Does that make sense? Yeah, definitely. So when I, I mean, I'm creating on these platforms also. We use it to promote big technology podcast, shorts, Instagram, reels, and TikTok. And obviously, I like watching them. So, and sort of millions and millions of other people, billions of people, apparently, maybe. One of the things that I'm always curious about is, is this the platform's pushing the demand? Because you put a post, a video up on any of them, and it just explodes. And so I'm always curious, like, whether this is platforms pushing the demand, users just being, you know, kind of addicted to it or something in the middle.

Where do you think this is this just massive amount of interest, is it platform pushed, or is it organic? Like, talk a little bit about why people are so interested in these videos. Yeah. I mean, I can only speak to what we do. And, you know, for us, it's never really about pushing the content to people in a way that's forced because ultimately that wouldn't be healthy for users. Like, they would be unhappy with the content and then they would use YouTube less. Of course. But you do make, you make design choices. You decide we want to put reels here or there. you know so that that yeah i mean i think that yeah i think in a lot of regards like the two like there's maybe like three main ways people get into shorts right so when you open you open youtube there's

forget yeah when you open youtube there is the sort of like home page there right and there's a bunch of longer form videos and there's also a short shelf we show you that shelf when we have a good signal that you're interested in some content and like where that shelf appears in the feed is the result of ranking it in the feed and the videos that are in that shelf is also the of recommendations. And so we show that to you when we believe you're going to want to engage with it. And there's also a shorts tab where you can just tap on it and just start watching video immediately. You don't sort of browse the shelf. You just kind of jump in. And then that shelf that's on home also exist on like the watch pages for YouTube videos because below those videos is a feed

of recommendations. And then when we think that you're going to be interested in shorts, we we recommend it there. So we don't want to waste that space, right? As YouTube in general, we don't want to put things there that people don't want because if we did that, we're just sort of wasting real estate, so to speak. We'd rather put things there that users find engaging. And so there's really not a push. I think more than anything, the way I think about it is making space for short form video. And all indications are there is a lot of demand for it on the platform. And so, you know, users decide to engage with it when they feel like there's something for them there. So it's really not a push. Right. So if it's not the platform, what do you think

makes this so, these videos so damn appealing to people? Well, I think that the nature of the feed is quite interesting because when videos become short, browsing them is watching them, right? So it's very much so like rapid fire teleporting from one topic to another or one creator to another. And so that can be quite entertaining and engaging because it's on one hand, when you get something you like, you can dwell on it and enjoy it. And then as you're flipping through it, it's relatively, it doesn't feel so bad if there's a video that you don't enjoy because it's very interactive and you could just switch to the next one. So that high level of interactivity and reactiveness of the feed makes it so that. you know, what you enjoy, you'll oftentimes get exposed to new things and get more of what you enjoy and see less of what you don't want. And so I think the opportunity, because the videos are

short, the opportunity is that that feed can be very reactive to your interest. And we certainly aim to make it a feed that is really aligned with, you know, not only delighting you, but sometimes surprising you with new content. You mentioned the point about addictiveness. Like, we certainly don't ever want that to be the case. What we try and do is measure. whether or not people are satisfied with the content, not just that they're watching it, but that they actually felt satisfied with it. How do you measure that? Yeah, we run surveys and we ask you like, hey, did you like this video?

We ask you to rate it like on a scale of one to five where one is you didn't like it and five is that you did because there could be scenarios where you're sort of engaging, but you didn't enjoy the content, in which case you would not be satisfied. Perhaps you see something that you disagree with and you're angry about, but you watched it any way as an example. So we really think about that valued watch time. And then we also have controls built into the YouTube app, like take a break reminders that at the YouTube app level sort of like shorts fall under that engagement. So how long does someone have to, you go ahead? How long does someone have to watch before getting that take a break reminder?

I'd have to double check, but I think it's able, I think you're able to configure it. And there's also like bedtime reminders to like interrupt you, right? Because sometimes you might just be actually enjoying it and actually satisfied. But you have to be, I think you have to be extremely heavy of a user to get any of these notifications or surveys even because, I mean, just, I mean, obviously, like, I'm not going to extrapolate my personal experience to every single person's experience on YouTube, but I watch a lot of these shorts, never gotten a notification that I should step away and definitely haven't gotten a survey about whether the video was high quality. So it must be that there, I mean, maybe I did.

and just forgot it, but it must be that these go to like smaller subsets of users. Yeah, I mean, we want to be cautious about, um, triggering too many surveys. And so not everybody gets them all the time, but we also try and leverage that data in order to kind of extrapolate and even try and like understand what people might rate as one star or five star, right? So like the data, the survey data is kind of like also input for additional work around kind of accounting for if we think people would have valued that that that watch time or not right i mean on one hand like you can you have uh television channels that are putting out shows that you know are not going to

leave people feeling all that good but they just binge them anyway so maybe it's holding you know this stuff up to a different standard but it does feel like the shorter videos are just way more addictive than sitting down with a series i'm not sure um i think that there is you know there is a narrative that I think is prevalent out there. On the other hand, when you're watching a long video or even a longer, like a movie, for example, like you might feel like you got to see it through where on short form video, you have lots of natural breaks. And so I'm not actually sure where it ends, but I just looked up right now, it really

did to take a break reminder. If you find, if you find you're watching too much, you can go into the settings and you can configure that to whatever time you want. There's like some slatters in there. So I wouldn't encourage you to watch less short form video unless you felt like you're watching too much. But it's under your control. What percent of users actually know that that control exists and go and use it? I'm not sure.

I don't have that data off the top of my head, unfortunately. Yeah. I'm glad you shared about it. I had no idea that was there. So speaking of, you know, talking about longer form series, a lot of times people, you know, sit back and watch them on their couch in the living room. And now you guys are taking shorts and bringing them to the living room and you can watch them on your TV now. So at first when I heard about this, I was like, okay, seems like a fairly unnatural place to use, to use them. Like the shorts and TikToks and real seem to be, you know, much better for your phone where you're just there scrolling through.

Maybe you can use a remote for the same behavior. But obviously, the YouTube app is pretty popular on smart TV. So what was the thinking behind that? And what makes you convince that the format is right there? Yeah, great question. You know, I think in general, great content, even if it's more native to one sort of device, sort of shouldn't be trapped to that device. And so when I think about the living room experience, it's one of the fastest growing

sort of screens at YouTube. And shorts is another fast growing area. And so for me, I'm really excited about bringing shorts to the living room experience. Of course, there is a very sort of personal sort of consumption experience when you're holding a phone in your hand and flipping through short form video, where when you think about the living room, it's basically built around multiple people watching that device. And so I think that there are some interesting dynamics there that may inform the experience as it matures over time.

But I think the overall motivation here is that, like, the creators are investing a lot in shorts to make great content. And that content really should be able to be watched anywhere YouTube videos are watched. And the living room is just such an important and growing platform that really motivated us to extend a short form video viewing experience to the living room experience. Todd Sherman is with us. He's the director of product management for shorts at YouTube. also former Twitter and Snapchat. We'll talk a little bit about Snapchat when we come back after the break

and a little bit more about shorts for the living room and YouTube in general. Back right after this. Hey everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news.

Now they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustled Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on the second half of big technology podcast. Todd Sherman is with us, Director of Product Management at YouTube. Todd, you have this very interesting, I mean, background because you were the person who was basically you're responsible for really core formats at three important, you know, new social media

companies. I don't know if you considered YouTube social media. Maybe that's another conversation. But Twitter, you did the tweets. YouTube, you're doing shorts. Snapchat. You did stories. What was it like running stories at Snapchat?

And it's kind of interesting because, you know, you were at a place that had its format copied by others when you were at Snapchat. Now you're at YouTube where you're actually working to. I don't know. I know you said you guys experimented with short form before TikTok, but it does look like, you know, short to some form of TikTok clone. So what does it feel like being on both sides of the action on that type of thing? Yeah, you know, I think innovation happens in a lot of different ways. When I think to Snapchat, you know, I was not part of the original team that pioneered stories there. I had the good fortune of being able to work on parts

of it, including tools for Discover Publishers, which is sort of like not friend stories and working on the Discover page as well. So when I think about stories, though, like really the format of stories, part of the reason I wanted to work at Snapchat is because I felt like there was a ton of really first principles thinking going on there. And the status update, so to speak, kind of really became native to the phone, the phone that has a camera in it. Right. When we say stories, like we're talking about like a slideshow of media, photos and videos, right? There's an effemorality window on it after 24 hours. It falls away.

And the viewer taps through it to kind of control the scrubber and the experience, right? And so like stories is just such a innovative format. And I think it really was a departure from the sort of way that status updates worked before that, which was like a smooth scrolling feed of all these different content types, you know, including text and photos of different shapes. and maybe a video every once in a while or even articles, etc. But it was really focused on close friends being able to update each other. And that type of innovation was really centered at Snapchat.

When I compare that and really contrast that with short form video like we were talking about earlier, it's really kind of the result of many layers of innovation that started with Vine and then many apps over many years kind of took what worked and then built on top of it and improved it until it eventually became mainstream. So I sort of try and take the sort of like strategic perspective of where things came from, what problems are they solving for users and what ought to be carry forward and embraced. And then where is there opportunities to kind of build new and innovative things to meet the next user needs? So, you know, innovation does happen in lots of different ways.

Yeah. So well, that's interesting. It's sort of what you now sound like what the Facebook people said when they copied stories. But anyway, you know, it's always, well, I do think that I don't think that stories was, it's not the same as like, like how TikTok got where it was. TikTok is the latest layer of many layers where I think stories was more singularly invented kind of like at Snapchat instead of like the layering across many companies in many years. So I think they're different in that regards. Speaking about the platforms, do you spend time posting and watching on all three platforms? Let's see, on shorts, TikTok and reels.

And if you do, what do you think the differences are between them? I absolutely do across multiple accounts, really. I think that there is a lot of differences. You know, TikTok, for example, has its roots in musically in trends. And I think that when you look at a lot of the top TikTok creators and you filter out people that are famous for other reasons other than being on TikTok, that you find a lot of people that are those that participate in those trends have grown large audiences. And so, you know, just for your listeners, when I talk about trends,

what I'm talking about is sort of sets of videos that you experience space throughout the feed as you're swiping through it. And, you know, they tend to share like the same song or media and the same concept, and people kind of replicate or riff on that concept in order to join on the trend, and maybe the trend lasts, you know, a week or two. And some of them could get quite big, even if you're not active on these platforms, you probably remember Old Town Road. Like, that was like a really big trend that many, many people participated in. So, you know, trends are really prominent part of TikTok, and it's also something that we're interested in, but it's really like their roots are really in it. I think that, uh,

the ability to get an audience on the platform is something that is also very, very important. And so how quickly you're able to get that initial audience or perhaps even go viral, like TikTok has been working at that for many years. And that's also, of course, an area that we've been investing in. You know, no one likes to shot into the void. So in shorts, we've even, we've been focused on making sure that we can get people in audience, the audience they deserve as quickly as possible. So, you know, I think there's been a lot of innovations over the years.

And when you think about why those things matter, you know, it really all comes down to like aligning what the users need. In this case, I'm giving you some examples around creators being inspired with trends to participate or getting an audience. And those are new areas that I think historically the creators desire to be creative and get an audience weren't met in that same way previously. And so those are new innovative areas that we're interested in. And I think that's one thing that I would point out that TikTok does quite well.

Ron Jen Roy was on a couple weeks ago, and he mentioned that, what do you say? He said that his theory is that these platforms give you a ton of distribution early on to sort of get you hooked on posting. Can you confirm or deny that? I have no idea what TikTok does exactly in our algorithm at scale. we don't try and trick people, if that's what you're asking. I mean, he's asking, you know, but you did say you want to get people an audience early. So, yeah, the question is, you know, is there anything in the algorithm that, that juices the early reach so that people can't build that audience early? Now, the, I think the simple answer is no.

I think the more nuanced answer is, is that, you know, when somebody starts a new account, we often don't know. much about them. They don't have a lot of history, for example. They've not posted a lot of videos before. And so when you create, when somebody creates that first video, we really try and understand what we can about the video through, you know, technology. Like, what is this video about? Perhaps what are they talking about? Or did they use a song? Or are there things that we can understand about the video, even before anybody engages with it? And that's one way through that understanding that we might be able to get it in front of people that enjoy content for which we believe that they may have some affinity for. So you kind of are getting the video a seed

audience in order to gather signals about it. And then those signals that viewers, they like how much they engage with it, that they like it, share it, comment, like all the things you can do with the video, those kind of inform our ability to get it more audience or the signals we may get is that this video is actually not likely to be enjoyed by that many people. So really what we're trying to do is when I say get each video, the audience deserves as quickly as possible, we're trying to really get each video, like get each creator on the biggest stage that they can kind of like deserve to get on, right? It's really up to the viewers, but we're putting an extra emphasis on figuring out how much

more audience any particular video deserves. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's an interesting thing that I've noticed with TikTok and YouTube is that it's almost like distribution is a bit of a step function where the platforms will seed out the videos to a certain number of users, wait to see how they react. If you earn the right to be seen by more people, then it jumps up again. And even my agency says there's this belief that there's like these sort of brackets that you fall in, like a couple hundred views. And then maybe if you do well there, you get to a thousand. If you do well there, you get to 10,000. Is that right? I mean, not the specific number.

But it does seem like that's what you're describing, where there's this and the step function I see in the analytics in terms of the way that things are distributed. Yeah, I think conceptually it's roughly right. Like, we don't really want to have step functions per se, but it's absolutely true that we'll, you know, we don't send it out to everybody on the platform. We sort of send it out to a portion of people, a small portion of people, especially when we don't know that much. You know, I think that there's an analogy here perhaps like in the physical world. Like, let's say that you were great with singing and a guitar, right? Like, at first, you, who do you start with? You, like, maybe go to, like, your community center or perhaps, like, a local bar or something

like this. And it's, like, a relatively small audience. And then if you get traction there, that opens up opportunities to do more and bigger things, right? And so, like, kind of proving yourself along the way is generally how it works to build an audience. You don't sort of open for a stadium full of people on your first gig, you know? And it's fascinating how that dynamic exists for each video that people post. I think it does, but also the sort of history of that creator also matters, right? Like if you have a track record of driving lots of audience, that absolutely influences what could be for the next one.

You could also, like, it's also interesting because, you know, you talk about this career progression. And this really is a good parallel because, you know, you can go from that person playing the local music hall to someone playing Madison. Square Garden in one night on YouTube. Pretty interesting. Yeah, I think that we absolutely want people to get the audience they deserve. And sometimes that might mean getting a big audience quickly. And we also want to. Yeah.

Yeah, sure. It's happened to me. Like we did, well, I just, this is the reason why I decided to invest a little bit more in shorts is because like the first video I posted just to see. I knew we were going to talk. I just wanted to see what it was like a couple months ago. ago. And it went from, you know, zero to 100 to 1,000 to 32,000, within a day. I mean, that's going from literally your local music hall to something bigger than MSG overnight. Yeah. Which is wild. And this happens on TikTok, too, this whole step function thing is we see

the same exact thing with TikTok. We don't see it with Reels. Reels is very interesting. And maybe this is because I created a new account, but what real is like, you can post. And unless you have, you know, it's still so much based off of a follow model versus algorithm, which I think is a real liability. Because, you know, I imagine you guys are considering, this means you guys are considering all videos on YouTube for potentially explosive distribution, you know, whereas like there's, their universe is much smaller. Yeah, you know, I think that like there's like an underlying interesting user.

desire here, which is, you know, putting yourself out on stage and sort of knowing that that stage could like almost under your feet grow to be very large. So it's almost like you feel like you're kind of the excitement of maybe like buying a lot of a ticket or something or you're kind of to describe it. Yeah. You know, I think that that's, you know, that's an interesting part of it. There's also the flips out of it, which is just that continued effort, um, of making good videos ought to pay off, you know, as they connect with viewers. But then there's the flip side of it, which is like, kind of like the lot of ticket mentality. And I think both of those kind of tap into people's desire to express himself and get an audience. Yeah, we tend to know, like,

within like the first couple hours, whether this video is going to explode or whether this video is basically dead from the start. And there's, there's interesting. There's certainty there. Yeah. We're always working to kind of like close that loop quicker because we'd rather not wait many, many days, for example, before giving you a signal of what works and what doesn't. Right. There's something important, I think, about making that feedback loop tight. So we're always working to responsibly make that faster. Yeah, totally. And old school YouTube, it actually seems to be a much more linear progression. Is there like something like, I guess this goes back to our question at the beginning about what it takes to recommend something or maybe

the way the product works. And maybe because you watch less YouTube, less of the old school YouTube videos than you would a shorts because so it takes more time to go through that process. Yeah, I think you're pointing out something that is important, which is like internally, we refer to it as exploration, which is, you know, when we're getting all of these videos, a seed audience, we're like, we're bringing them into people's feeds and we're not doing that randomly. We're trying to get some signal that you might like this video, but we also don't know as much about it as we would prefer. And so because people are flipping through dozens or hundreds of videos, it's actually pretty reasonable for us to insert some of those videos that we don't

know as much about that we would prefer and explore them in that feed. And because so many people are flipping through videos, you have a pretty good ability to explore lots of videos and figure out which ones are the best. So it's kind of like a big exploration challenge around figuring out which videos deserve more audience and then continuing to get them more audience as quickly and as responsibly as possible. Yeah. I know you probably can't answer this, but I'm going to ask you anyway. What percentage of video views are shorts making up on YouTube now compared to longer form videos? I wish I can answer that. The public numbers that we have released, by the way, like the way these numbers get released is because they like appear in like earnings

reports and publicly that they go through like a claims process where, we have our analyst really sort of hammer on them and make sure that there's rigor behind being able to publicly disclose them. So the company is generally, I think people would understand pretty choosy about which numbers they release. So I can't answer what percentage it is, but the latest stat we put out was 30 billion views a day. And that number was released back in April. And shorts continues to scale. And it's really a non-trivial. amount of views on on YouTube overall. It's

significant. 30 billion views a day and I think the last number was maybe 15 billion so it had doubled in some time frame. Yeah. I can't remember exactly. I'll do a quick search. Anyway, I'm just going to get to the next question, which is that as shorts start

to take up this much of the platform, it's obviously the way to run advertising is much more nascent. And so they're harder to make money off of, at least that's the conventional wisdom. And just looking at your YouTube's most recent earnings report,

which came out a couple weeks ago. So YouTube's advertising dropped from CNBC, dropped 2% year-over-year to 7.07 billion during the third quarter, below $7.42 billion. It was the first time YouTube's ad revenue had ever contracted since it started being broken out

in 2019. So is that a function of shorts taking up that much more time on the platform and YouTube trying to figure out a way to make money off of those videos. You know, as you as you might expect, I don't have any guidance beyond what Alphabet's leadership gives in earnings calls. But what I'll what I'll share with this is kind of interesting is that each time there's a new video format, like even just think about long form YouTube, the business model that

surrounded it kind of had to be rethought compared to television, which was the predominant consumption model before, right? And so television works a certain way with commercial breaks, YouTube, long form works a certain way with like pre-roll, we call it like ads that run before the video or mid-roll, which happens in between the video, similar to this podcast. And that's a certain business model that has a rev share around it. And then once again, short form is really, it's a different format and requires, I think, a fresh look at what it means to build the sustainable business model. So shorts is focused on inserting ads in the feed. We always want to get better at that, you know,

at giving people an ad that they find valuable at the right time. And so it's, earlier. I think the simple answer is that it's earlier. And the team is really excited about not only maturing our ability to monetize shorts, but also share that revenue with creators, which really should make it a much more sustainable sort of ecosystem. Let me ask you a question that, you know, is hopefully not going to get you in trouble with the SEC. In terms of the, you know, maturity of getting these shorts advertising units in there, right? In terms of like how far this monetization movement is. Are you at the early side of it? Are you the middle? Do you feel like you're pretty, you got it pretty set? Like, where is YouTube on that? In terms of just effectively

monetizing short form video? Yeah. Well, we just announced the Rev Share with creators. So, I want to ask about that next, but in terms of your ad, you know, the maturity of your ad product now. Yeah, I just mean in terms of calendar time, I guess shorts is relatively young and and working to monetize it is even younger. So, you know, when people ask me about shorts overall, it feels like we're still in the earlier stages. I know it seems like everybody's talking about shorts in YouTube. And so just by virtue of shorts being such a young and early product, I think that it's safe

to say that it overall is earlier stages. Yeah. Okay. You can't say it, but I will. I think that looking at most recent numbers, it does seem like people who are saying this is the end of YouTube at revenue, you know, might be misleading. I think what is probably the key point here, which is that short is early on. Let's go to the last thing I want to talk to you about, we talked a little bit about Vine and

the creators. YouTube is working to get creators in on the action. So I'm kind of curious to hear your perspective on the RevShare with creators, which I think is relatively new that you're going to rev share with almost all creators and including RevShare on Reels when it comes to that. And another thing is, you know, as you answer, there's one thing I want you to keep in mind, which is that a lot of people who have tried to turn on advertising on YouTube, unless they're massive creators, end up getting like 10 cents, you know, for a month's worth

of views. And is that going to, you know, will that persist? I'm really excited about a rev share for shorts. It is a different business model than adds tied to specific videos and a rev share based on that. It's more about kind of aligning with the fundamentals and strengths of the short form video feed. So how it's going to work is creators that get into the that are eligible for the YouTube partner program. We call that YPP for short. You know, after they've met that criteria, the amount of views that they generate will

basically earn them a percentage of the revenue that is generated from the advertisements inserted into the feed, even if that ad wasn't next to their video. Interesting. Even if they don't use like, like they could even. even use music and it doesn't affect it. So it's really a new sort of like feed-based revenue sharing model for for creators. And there are criteria to get into the YPP, the YouTube partner program. Yeah, what is it? A thousand subscribers and some some number of hours per month that are in the last 30 days that people have generated. For shorts, it's it's based on views. I'm looking for the

very latest. I think it's 10 million views over 90 days and a thousand subs. I'll have to double check those numbers. And then there's a 45% rev share there. So it's going to be interesting to see how it works. I think how it works out the gate will be interesting. But also as the ecosystem as the ecosystem matures and creators continue to invest, I think it'll sort of evolve as we try and align those incentives and make sure that creators making great, videos that drive lots of audience get reward for that. For creators, this could be really great because, you know, it used to be, we started, the internet began with user-generated content, and there was never an expectation that you

would really get paid for what you were generating as a user. But now you have shorts, you have TikTok, you have reels, all competing for the best creators. It's a good time to be sitting in the middle and, you know, being a person that, if you are a person that can create quality video, sort of stand a chance. to get paid because that really is sort of what you're competing against with TikTok and Reels, right? It's the quality of content worth in the algorithm. What do you think? I think that the algorithm is very important to help people get videos they want, to, you know, there's many aspects of it. There's many aspects of the algorithm that help inspire creators

or get them an audience. So the algorithm is like probably one of the most important aspects of making sure that you can grow that ecosystem overall. But the ecosystem, I think, is most sustainable when passionate people are rewarded for the contributions, which is why it's so, I think, exciting to have short-form video inside of YouTube because YouTube, you know, before creator economy was a buzzword. YouTube was sharing revenue with creators, really from those early stages. It's really what made YouTube what it is. And that's how you got those vine people, you got those vine people, because they're like, oh, we can go make money there. Yeah, I think it's important that people can build businesses and build and invest and get something out of it beyond

beyond just fame. Yeah. Okay. Well, Todd, why don't you share one more time, you know, what the, what the story is with the, if people want to watch these shorts on their living room TVs, how do they find them? Yeah. So by the time people listen to this podcast, we will start rolling out shorts on a TV near you. So that means that viewers are going to be able to enjoy the sort of like fun, interesting burst of content, 60 seconds or less on the big screen right in their living room. On the YouTube app? Yep, right in the YouTube living room app. You know, a lot of like we, the team did a lot of work to sort of evaluate different options and ultimately landed on an experience that I think is pretty delightful. And you

should expect to see this experience mature over time as we sort of learn how viewers are enjoying it and how best to improve it. So living room is one of our fastest growing ways of consuming and Schwartz is one of the fastest growing products inside of YouTube. So I'm really excited to see these two come together. Okay, Todd Sherman, thanks so much for joining. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks everybody for listening. Thank you, Nick Guadne for producing the audio editing, as always. Thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. Thanks to all of you, Once again, the listeners, appreciate you being here. If you're here at the end, and you can rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify,

again, that would go a long way to helping us bring more guests on great guests like Todd. That'll do it for us here on this week's show. They'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.