YouTube stars like MrBeast, whose elaborate videos get millions of clicks each month and earn him a fortune, can afford to spend thousands on Hollywood-level productions. Most everyone else is, well, stuck filming themselves and editing using basic tools.
Amjad Hanif, the YouTube executive in charge of creator payments and products, is convinced artificial intelligence will help level the playing field. AI tools, he tells Fortune, can give all creators access to top-level production.
“A lot of the effects—the visual quality, the visual imagery—up until now it’s taken a team of somebody like Jimmy to be able to produce,” Hanif said, referring to Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. MrBeast. “[AI] is going to make that available to a much broader group of creators.”
Hanif shared this sentiment with Fortune after parent Alphabet earlier this month announced strong quarterly earnings—YouTube was a particularly bright spot—and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan published a letter outlining the service’s priorities for 2024. Mohan’s bets for the 7,000-person organization include those AI tools that Hanif says will democratize creativity, a push to make YouTube home to high-quality content that users will want to stream on big-screen TVs, and subscription content.
This is an entirely different vision for YouTube than the one it painted just a few years ago, when watching clips on smartphone screens and authenticity (i.e., simply produced clips) were the main themes. The push also involves helping YouTubers branch out from making money entirely from a cut of ad revenue to also collecting money from subscriptions and from fans making direct contributions.
In terms of AI, Hanif says, YouTubers will be able to generate more revenue from the service’s language-dubbing service. AI technology lets creators translate their videos into English, Spanish, and Portuguese on the platform. YouTube’s translation tool, currently available in a limited test, is intended to help creators grow their international audiences and make more money from fans abroad through ads.
“The most seismic shift is the most recent one around AI,” Hanif says. “It is a very dramatic shift in the way creators operate, run their business, and create content.”
YouTube isn’t alone in this push. Meta and Snapchat have also rolled out versions of AI photo-editing tools and, alongside TikTok, have launched AI assistants.
Hanif, a 12-plus-year Google veteran, oversees the YouTube Partner Program, the most lucrative of the service’s programs for creators by the total amount of money paid out to them— $70 billion from ad and subscription revenues over the last three years. He also leads the analytics and engagement dashboard YouTube Studio, and other programs that millions of creators rely on to make, manage, and monetize YouTube content.
With over 3 million creators in the partner program and plans to grow this number consistently in the years to come, it may surprise some that Google announced plans to lay off 100 employees from YouTube’s creator management teams in January. Even so, Hanif remains unphased.
“Those are all the typical business changes and adjustments to staffing,” he says. “We’re continuing to move forward.”
The layoffs have not affected the amount of money paid to creators, Hanif says. As a whole, payments to creators of Shorts, short-form videos mostly for viewers using smartphones, have increased every month. This, though, may have less to do with YouTube’s success and more to do with creators switching to YouTube because of increasingly lower payments on rival platforms. TikTok ended its Creator Fund, which paid creators for videos of all lengths (replaced by a program that pays for 60-second-plus content). Meanwhile, some creators using Meta Reels have said that their earnings from it are low and inconsistent.
Still, one creator manager who would only speak to Fortune without being named for fear of retaliation from social media companies, says that YouTube is also “not paying as well as it used to.” This manager said that there’s a “huge frenzy” among creators to be accepted into Snapchat’s top programs, which pay them as much as $10,000 daily.
Whatever the case, Hanif said he expects YouTube’s creator payment rates to remain steady and the number of people in the program to grow. In contrast, he warned that earnings on rival services will be unpredictable. “It’s a lot easier to have a few good big paychecks, but to be able to do that year-in, year-out, month to month, to be able to rely on it—it’s hard because it means being transparent,” he says.
