Every year, YouTube outlines its priorities, and the 2026 edition previews what product updates to expect.
The first tentpole from YouTube CEO Neal Mohan is “Reinventing entertainment: Creators are the new stars & studios.” In terms of the end user (watcher) experience, YouTube will “bring even more variety to Shorts by integrating different formats – like image posts – directly into the feed.” The format now “averages 200 billion daily views.”
On the Music front, YouTube’s investment includes “helping you find your next go-to artist, uncovering the stories behind the songs that move you or making it easier to discover and experience new releases.” That sounds like more discovery features and the AI “Beyond the Beat” moving beyond the experimental stage.
Mohan reiterates that 10 genre-specific YouTube TV Plans across sports, entertainment, and news are coming, as well as “fully customizable multiview.”
The other tentpoles are:
- Building the best place for kids & teens: Giving parents control over Shorts usage/consumption
- Powering the creator economy: More ways to earn, including shopping (“buy it without leaving the YouTube app”), brand deals, fan funding
- “We’re also giving creators new tools to make these partnerships successful, like the ability to add a link to a brand’s site in Shorts or swap out a branded segment once a deal concludes, transforming back catalogs into recurring revenue streams.”
- Supercharging & safeguarding creativity
On the last priority, YouTube says “more than 1M channels used [its] AI creation tools daily in December.” Creators this year will be able to “create a Short using your own likeness, produce games with a simple text prompt, and experiment with music.”
YouTube says “AI will remain a tool for expression, not a replacement” and equates it to how the “synthesizer, Photoshop and CGI revolutionized sound and visuals.”
There’s an interesting section on “Managing AI Slop.”
The rise of AI has raised concerns about low-quality content, aka “AI slop.” As an open platform, we allow for a broad range of free expression while ensuring YouTube remains a place where people feel good spending their time. Over the past 20 years, we’ve learned not to impose any preconceived notions on the creator ecosystem. Today, once-odd trends like ASMR and watching other people play video games are mainstream hits. But with this openness comes a responsibility to maintain the high quality viewing experience that people want. To reduce the spread of low quality AI content, we’re actively building on our established systems that have been very successful in combatting spam and clickbait, and reducing the spread of low quality, repetitive content.
From the viewer perspective, YouTube says “more than 20 million users learned more about the content they watched” through the Ask tool on videos in December. Autodubbed videos are another example of AI for watchers.
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