Artificial intelligence plays a role in keeping YouTube safe: MD Chatterjee

At 455 million users a month in March 2023 (Comscore), YouTube is India’s largest over-the-top (OTT) platform. It is also a part of India’s largest media firm – the estimated Rs 25,000 crore (FY22) Google India. According to analysts, YouTube brings in roughly Rs 8,000 crore or about a third of this topline. It competes not just with Meta and other digital players but with Disney-Star, Sony, Zee among the traditional media behemoths. As it celebrates its fifteenth anniversary in India, Vanita Kohli-Khandekar speaks to Ishan Chatterjee, who took over as managing director YouTube India about six months back, about the video streaming giant’s plans for India. Edited excerpts:

Where is YouTube India today?
 

The diversity of cultures and languages in India leads to a very vibrant creator ecosystem. That’s something that is unprecedented. Two, India is seeing certain trends that are helping YouTube define its own future. For instance, short form video and the way it is exploding in India, and what that means in terms of democratising content creation. The third is smart TVs and YouTube consumption. In May 2022, over 60 million people streamed YouTube on their TV. While watching YouTube on TV in December 2022, viewers watched videos that were on average over 250 per cent longer than those viewed on mobile and desktop. And the average session was over 400 per cent longer. (TV remained YouTube’s fastest growing screen in 2022 in terms of watchtime) India’s importance to YouTube is not just at scale and its size, but also as a barometer of where consumption and content creation is going.

What are the big trends in consumption and genres?

Earlier, gaming on YouTube used to be all about live streaming your gameplay but now if you go into some of our popular creators, they have taken say Minecraft, one of the big gaming titles and they do elaborate scripted storytelling. So much effort has gone into building these worlds and creating these storylines. We had 20 billion hours of Minecraft consumption in a single year from India (2021).
 

There is this huge explosion of hyper-local or micro communities. YouTube has every single community you can imagine - dance, calisthenics, exercise, podcasts et al. But what is very interesting is some niche categories, which are also huge. For instance, there is this guy called Mohit Yodha (ComicVerse). He only does videos talking about the Marvel Universe in Hindi. Then there is USA Raja Telugu Vlogs who caters to the NRI community. He is a Telugu-speaker and just breaks down the day-to-day basic living challenges of being in the US.

Where do you think this market stands in terms of consumption? And how does YouTube leverage it?

Our goal is to be the home of all things video. To this end, we prioritise two things. One, the way we organise ourselves is all about supporting the success of our creators by helping them create and monetise businesses online.

Two, creators, tell us all the time about product feedback. So we build specific products for them based on that feedback that we get again. For example, Courses was something we announced in December last year at Google for India. That came from very specific feedback that our creators that said ‘It’s great that I can make playlists. But I really want to have a most structured learning environment where I can have other sort of material that I can share with my students and have a potential to charge specifically for it.’
 

Three, going deep into regional across different languages.

Where are you in regional languages?
 

There is always more that we can do on the regional front. But we recently conducted some studies and saw that 93 per cent of Indians today consume YouTube in an Indic language (Google/Kantar Video Landscape Research 2019). And then last year, the Oxford Economics did an economic impact report and found over 88 per cent of respondents felt that it was easy for them to find language content on YouTube in their preferred language. So we have definitely made progress.

There are lots of examples of creators who have broken out across different languages in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi. Like Dushyant Kukreja vlogs on his daily life in short videos and he’s up to 20 million subscribers. There’s a Telugu speaking creator called Harsha Sai who’s modeled his entire YouTube channel on Mr. Beast.

What is the opportunity artificial intelligence (AI) presents for YouTube? What is the conflict/ challenge it holds?
 

AI has been core to Google for many, many years and also, for YouTube. We run a recommendation engine where it plays a role. Looking ahead, the one thing that AI will start to do especially for our creator community is make the process of creation more fun, more cool and easier. Lots of stuff about video creation that is really quite tedious like cleaning up audio. We have lots of creators who shoot in their cars apparently because the lighting is very good in a car. But the problem with that is the traffic sound around it. In the future you could get rid of the traffic sound automatically by using AI.

Secondly, AI plays a role in helping us keep the platform safe. We think of our ecosystem in three different buckets. We have got viewers or users, creators and partners, and advertisers. All three do not want to be associated with a platform that has poor quality content. We’ve invested a lot of team time technology in order to make sure we get this right. We have a set of very clear community guidelines, around different policy verticals - hate speech, violent extremism, suicide and self-harm. We identify videos that violate those policies and we take them down. AI does a large part of that. There is some manual intervention but over a period of time AI catches most of it. That is just the remove bucket. The other big thing that we do is prioritise or connect people to high quality information from authoritative sources and reputed news organisations.

Have you made any strategic shifts in the last couple of years?
 

One of our big challenges is staying on top of changing user preferences in a very fast paced dynamic environment. Shorts as a category did not even exist three or four years ago. Now we recently announced that we had 1.5 billion monthly active users (April 2022) on Shorts globally and 50 billion views (December 2022) a day. This is just for Shorts on YouTube alone. What that has translated for us from a strategic standpoint is, if that is where consumption is going, that is the demand, what do we do to make our creator successful? One of the big things there is, how do we lower the barrier for creation. Earlier on, you needed reasonably sophisticated editing tools, computer, desktop. Now, everything can be done on your mobile phone. As a strategic change then we have invested in making it easier to come in and create and monetise shorts.