Who Is Neal Mohan.

Neal Mohan is the chief executive of YouTube, and the letter he publishes at the start of each year is, in our view, the closest thing the platform puts out to a plan.

Read one letter and you get a list of features, much like everything YouTube announced at Made on YouTube 2026. Read three together and you see a direction: YouTube talks about creators less as uploaders and more as businesses that make television. For a brand running a channel, that is the most useful lens there is.

People running a brand channel on YouTube should read these letters closely.

Who Neal Mohan is

YouTube’s own author page for him says he became CEO in 2023.

Before that, he was YouTube’s Chief Product Officer. YouTube credits him with “leading the company’s successful forays into streaming, short-form video, subscriptions” and related areas.

He also sits on the board of directors of Starbucks. He holds a degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and YouTube’s page notes that TIME named him its CEO of the Year in 2025.

The route to the job

Mohan’s career did not start at YouTube. YouTube’s page says he worked on product development and strategy at DoubleClick before Google bought it.

CNBC’s report of his appointment says he came to Google “with the DoubleClick acquisition in 2007”. He went on to become Senior Vice President of Display and Video Advertising at Google, the title YouTube’s own page gives him.

In 2023, Susan Wojcicki, who had joined YouTube as its chief executive nine years earlier, announced she was stepping down. CNBC reported that “Neal Mohan, chief product officer, will take the lead as the SVP and new head of YouTube.” Wojcicki said she had worked with him for close to 15 years.

So the person setting YouTube’s direction is a product and advertising executive who had already run the product side of YouTube itself. In our reading, that background shows in the letters: they read as product roadmaps with a thesis on top.

The 2024 letter: creators as media companies

The 2024 letter, published on 6 February 2024, set out four bets. In YouTube’s German edition of the letter, they were that AI would support human creativity, that creators should be seen as the next generation of media companies, that YouTube’s next goals were the TV screen and subscriptions, and that protecting the community was fundamental.

The TV point came with numbers. The letter said people watched more than a billion hours of YouTube content on TV screens every day, and that a Nielsen report on streaming in the US had put YouTube first for watch time for 11 months. It also said YouTube TV had more than 8 million subscribers.

The 2025 letter: the startups of Hollywood

The 2025 letter, published on 11 February 2025, the year YouTube turned 20, sharpened the language. Its four bets were:

• “YouTube will remain the epicenter of culture.”
• “YouTubers are becoming the startups of Hollywood.”
• “YouTube is the new television.”
• “AI will make it easier to create and enhance the YouTube experience for everyone.”

On television, it went further than the year before: “TV is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S.”

On money, it said that in the previous year more than half of the channels earning five figures or more in US dollars on YouTube made money from sources other than ads and YouTube Premium.

It also claimed that YouTube “is now the most frequently used service for listening to podcasts in the U.S.”

The 2026 letter: creators as studios

The 2026 letter, published on 21 January 2026, sets out four priorities: reinventing entertainment, building the best place for kids and teens, powering the creator economy, and supercharging and safeguarding creativity.

Its section on entertainment is headed “Creators are the new stars & studios”. Of the series creators now make, it says: “These are shows, built by creators who green-light themselves.”

The scale claims grow too. The letter says YouTube “has been #1 in streaming watchtime in the U.S. for nearly three years, according to Nielsen”, and that “in the past four years alone, we’ve paid over $100 billion to creators, artists, and media companies.”

It acknowledges that the rise of AI has raised concerns about low-quality content, which it calls AI slop. Alongside that, it promises creators new tools “to manage the use of their likeness in AI-generated content”, and says parents will soon be able to control how much time their children spend scrolling Shorts.

The thread through all three letters

Put the three side by side and the creator moves from media company, to Hollywood startup, to studio. The screen moves from a billion hours a day and 11 months at the top of US streaming watch time, to the primary device for YouTube viewing in the US, to nearly three years at the top.

That is not a slogan repeated three times. Each year the language gets stronger and the numbers offered for it get bigger.

Our reading is simple. YouTube wants to be judged as television, and it wants creators who behave like the people who make television: series, formats, schedules and production standards.

What it tells a brand channel

If YouTube is telling the world its best creators are studios, a brand channel competes with studios, not with other brands’ upload folders.

In practice, that points to a few decisions:

• Plan in series, not one-off uploads, so a viewer on a TV screen has a reason to watch the next episode.
• Make the work hold up on the largest screen in the house, not only on a phone.
• Treat the channel as a production with a rhythm, not a place to post what marketing already made.

That is the territory of video production and editing more than of social posting, and a brand that treats it that way is building something a viewer can return to.

What the letters do not say

The letters are YouTube’s own case for itself. The figures in them are YouTube’s figures, or Nielsen’s as YouTube reports them, and they are there to make a point.

A letter written for the whole platform cannot tell you what any of it means for one channel’s reach. Read them as a statement of direction, not a forecast for your account.

How NBK reads a platform leader

We read a chief executive’s letter for what it repeats, not what it announces. Features come and go. A thesis that survives three years of letters is the one the product teams are building towards.

For YouTube, that thesis is shows. For a channel that earns from its videos, the YouTube Partner Programme is where that thesis meets the money.

Next step

Take your last ten uploads and ask a single question of each: would this make sense as an episode of something?

If your team is posting regularly but still feels stuck, NBK can help find the constraint in the system.