YouTube CEO Neal Mohan recently insisted that he isn’t worried about Netflix and other streaming services luring away the service’s most popular creators.
Mohan’s comments came during a long interview with The New York Times series The Interview — which, as Mohan noted, streams on YouTube. Indeed, he seemed to play the magnanimous winner for much of the conversation; when asked about Oscar host Conan O’Brien’s poking fun at YouTube, Mohan simply replied that O’Brien is “very funny” and that his “Team Coco channel does really well on YouTube.”
As for popular podcasts like “The Breakfast Club” and “My Favorite Murder” moving to Netflix, Mohan said it’s “flattering” that competitors “see us as the center of culture.” But he said that when he speaks to popular YouTubers, they tell him that “no matter what they look to do, they understand that YouTube is their home.”
“I have not come across YouTubers that have completely yanked their content off YouTube,” Mohan said. He added that when YouTubers negotiate with other platforms, those streamers will always “acquiesce to what our YouTubers ultimately know is the right decision for them in the long term, which is to never leave their home.”