TIME’s 2025 CEO of the Year, Neal Mohan, thinks of himself as the “mayor of YouTube.” At a “A Year in Time,” TIME’s event in New York City on Dec. 10 staged to celebrate Mohan and other Leaders of the Year, including Entertainer Leonardo DiCaprio and Athlete A’ja Wilson, Mohan spoke with TIME’s Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs about YouTube’s role in culture and political discourse, its relationship to creators and kids, and Mohan’s vision for the future of the platform.
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“When we go to work at YouTube, we don’t really think in terms of who the other streaming or feed platforms are,” Mohan told Jacobs. “Our job is to build the stage on which the amazing creators and programmers do what they do every single day.” Creators are the lifeblood of the platform, which over two billion people use. Over 500 hours of content are uploaded every minute, according to Google.
Jacobs asked Mohan how he would explain what YouTube has become to somebody from 2006 (the platform is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year). It’s “the place where the cultural zeitgeist is set every day,” replied Mohan. “Irrespective of where you are, if you’re a young person opening your phone, you’re opening the cutting-edge of culture.” Mohan argues that the platform’s flexibility was central to its cultural dominance. “What I think is profound about
YouTube is that if you have a story to tell, you can do it in a 15-second short, a 15-minute video, a 15-hour live stream—and everything in between.”
Asked whether he thought Hollywood had a problem with companies like YouTube, Mohan pointed out that media companies are some of the biggest creators on the platform, operating dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of channels. “An enormous amount of the fandom around their properties happens on YouTube, and they know it,” he said. “They tell me that all the time.”
Jacobs noted that YouTube paid over $20 million to a trust building the White House ballroom to settle a lawsuit with President Donald Trump, and asked how Mohan explains the decision to staff and creators. “Our job is to continue to deliver on that fundamental promise of YouTube,” he said. “Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. I think things that get in the way of that mission can be distractions. So finding a way to contribute to, ultimately, what I hope is a good cause and putting it behind us is really the best way that we could have addressed that. And that’s what we did.”
Asked whether the Trump Administration had pressured him to censor certain types of comments, Mohan said, “we have millions of people posting content on the platform every single day, so naturally we are an important part of the civic discourse. I recognize that responsibility.” He noted that the company works with governments around the world, while at the same time he views it as his responsibility to ensure that YouTube lives up to its original promise: to be an open platform for free expression.
Jacobs cited a recent poll that found that roughly 1 in 5 U.S. teens were on either YouTube or TikTok “almost constantly,” and asked whether Mohan worried about the impact of that kind of engagement on children.
“Look, I talked about responsibility,” Mohan said. “The area where I feel we have paramount responsibility is to young people.” He pointed out that YouTube was the first platform to launch a standalone kids app, 10 years ago. Personally, he and his wife try to limit the amount of time their three children spend on platforms like YouTube. “The best thing we can do,” he said, “is to make it easy for parents to manage [the platform] on behalf of their children, in a way that’s suitable to their household.”
While technology will change how that content is consumed and created, Mohan expects the core to persist, he responded to a question about the future of the platform. “YouTube in its essence is going to continue to look a lot like it does today,” Mohan responded. “The magic of YouTube is that if you’re a creative person with an idea, nobody gets to tell you that you don’t look the right way, you’re the wrong gender, you’re from the wrong part of the world. If you have something amazing to share, you can come on to YouTube and do that, and that won’t change.”
A Year in TIME was presented by Rolex, American Family Insurance, Serum Institute of India, La Croix, and The Macallan.
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