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4 hours ago
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I worked for a few years inside one of the large teams at Google that touched Youtube’s product monetization roadmap. I’m not going to drop names or specific tools because I don’t want this tied back to me, but here’s what’s actually coming and it’s going to blindside a lot of people.
Let’s start with something most creators don’t fully get: the CEO of a public company doesn’t work for you.
They work for shareholders. Their entire legal responsibility is to maximize shareholder value. If they don’t they can literally get replaced or even sued for breach of fiduciary duty.
So when people talk about “Youtube caring about creators” understand this: that was never the business model.
Creators were just the cheapest content engine available at the time.
But that’s changing fast.
Here’s the quiet roadmap I saw forming internally (and you can connect the dots from public info too):
- AI video models are getting better exponentially. The storytelling, pacing, and visuals are already at early stage netflix level in labs. I’ve seen tests that made even internal employees do double takes.
- Generation speed is collapsing. Rendering a full video used to take hours. Now it’s minutes. Soon it’ll be real-time.
- Hardware requirements are falling through the floor. What once needed a $10k GPU rig will run on standard consumer devices.
That combo means the cost curve is about to invert.
Better → Faster → Cheaper.
At some point ai generated content becomes economically superior to human creators. And here’s where it gets uncomfortable:
Youtube’s revenue share with creators is 55/45.
When the company itself can generate host and own the full rights to ai videos… why keep paying 55% out?
Do the math.
Every AI video they generate in-house is 100% margin.
Every human video costs them 55%.
Now remember the CEO’s job: maximize shareholder value.
So what happens next is basically inevitable.
They’ll start integrating AI videos directly into the recommendation engine, testing performance against creator uploads. When those videos outperform (and they will) ad buyers will shift budgets there.
That gives leadership data justification to pour more resources into genai production.
From there the transition will look slow on the outside more “ai assisted” tools, maybe “ai cocreation programs.” But it’s a replacement plan.
At scale creators become redundant.
The audience won’t even notice because the content will still feel personalized.
That’s the real pivot: Youtube doesn’t need creators to personalize content anymore. The algorithm and the models are the creators.
And yes I’ve seen the economic models that make this worth it. When the cost of a video approaches zero, the ROI per ad-minute skyrockets. That’s what Wall Street wants. That’s what the CEO is legally obligated to deliver.
It’s not another stupid conspiracy. It’s just modern capitalism at scale.
I’ve been saying this for years but people are only now starting to wake up to it:
Creators were never the product.
They were the training data.
(I’m not going to name any tools or labs already capable of this that’ll just get moderators to remove my post)
