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hey what's up everybody welcome to this episode of the colin and samir show today we're up in mountain view at google i o and last week i was in new york at youtube brandcast both of these events inform us about the future of the internet i'm sitting
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here my mind is kind of blown yes to be honest so we're going
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to walk you through what we learned at both of these events how it pertains to what's happening with creators and youtube and what it means for the future of the internet all right we have a short time in this room so we going to dive right in all right so let's start last week new york city brandcast this is like youtube's coachella although youtube i think coachella is youtube's coachella yeah coachella is youtube's coachella what i mean is like this is a major moment for youtube where they bring a bunch of creators on stage and they make announcements about what's happening on youtube to a room full of advertisers i think one of the
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most striking images from that time was neil mohan in times square with welcome to the youtube era on the billboard
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yeah so what's important there of why does it say welcome to the youtube era if you don't have context what this week is all about in new york city is upfronts upfronts are where tv networks would come forward and still do to this day come forward and present their next slate of programming to advertisers to get buy in from advertisers
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and they often do it with some of their biggest stars from their shows
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exactly like if you listen to the friends cast talk about upfronts back in the day like they were the the big celebrities at upfronts in the nineties so they would stand up and talk about the next season of friends and then advertisers would go you know what i'm going to buy a full year of advertising on the network so historically youtube has mostly put forward creators in this moment also talked about different partners they have like when we did some hosting at brandcast the nfl was on stage right roger goodell came on stage and was like hey we're doing this big game with youtube so it's like
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all about this program they also highlight a lot of the advertisers who've had success in the past that was part of what we spoke about the first time we spoke on stage at brandcast was hey here are some advertisers here are some brands and here are some ad agencies that have done valuable work that's been effective on youtube so if you are an agency or you are a brand and you're in the audience this is a good place to advertise
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over the years brandcast has evolved from the messaging to the musical guests we've seen doja cat lady gaga billie eilish alex warren alex warren and then this time i saw chapel roan which is very exciting but the biggest difference this year with brandcast was it was all about creator shows and the language that youtube used you know in the article about the new york times that dropped the day of was the creator slate meaning this is a slate of shows coming to youtube that is very different language that is definitively the language that television networks have used in the past and there's been kind of a line in the sand before that youtube is a platform it has creators who make what they make but there's not as much you know focus on these are
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the shows that creators there's not as much marketing there's not as much eventizing historically even youtube does not know what's coming out on a given day and that's what makes youtube youtube historically whereas on a netflix you know exactly generally what's coming out you know their biggest shows you're not going to miss if stranger things the season series finale is coming out it will be everywhere so
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obviously you know if you've listened to our show you've heard us talk about netflix versus youtube constantly even in our last episode with mark rober this a lot of what we're talking about is this curation and editorial nature of creator content now so i want to talk about the three forces that i think are changing youtube from videos to shows and also what does it mean for youtube to be pitching creator shows or creators to be pitching their own shows in a room full of youtube's biggest advertisers first and foremost to talk about the three forces at hand here number one to me is connected tv viewership the fact that the majority of viewership of youtube is on connected tv's is dictating the type of content that creators are making i think that's for sure a sit back turn on your tv experience even for me as a consumer like when you watch youtube on your tv how many videos do you think you're watching in a session three max
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max yeah yeah because they're all twenty minutes long i'm sitting on my sofa my wife is next to me it's a tv like experience it's a bit
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of a nuisance to click around and go from video to video to video on tv in my opinion yeah like i don't want to watch a bunch of five minute videos and i think you know the narrative over the past couple of years of connected tv viewership there's higher cpms on connected tv there's a lot of incentive to push us to make content that's meant for tv
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yeah and to that point higher cpms creators are making longer episodes audiences are ready to watch them because they're sitting on their sofa advertisers are coming in and creators are making more money which they can then invest back in their videos right and make higher quality longer episodic programing whereas in the past it was just like i guess i'll make a video today i'll make a video tomorrow right exactly take it one step
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at a time that's my number two which is that financing is meeting ambition right so both from the platform when you make longer content like for us we had a three hour episode with emma chamberlain that is three million views fifty percent of those views come from connected tv's first an average of forty eight minutes the advertising revenue on that video i don't remember what it was but dramatically higher than typical for us i'll look at it let me look
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it up keep talking but i'll look
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it up okay and when you have additional financing from the platform you also now have more sponsors than ever in the space and more unique sponsors at brandcast i talked to at and t i talked to apple who's interested in spending with creators right now like there's new brands in the space that want to spend with creators that's creating more money which is allowing us to hire bigger teams which is now allowing us to also bring in people from traditional media and make longer shows bigger budgets bigger shows the third thing is what we've been talking about the abundance era something i'm noticing is that there are countless creators who make videos of course but creators who make shows it is way easier to talk about a creator who makes a show than to talk about a creator who makes videos because you have packaging around it you can actually talk about it hey that's colin and samir they make the colin and samir show that's probably not a great
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example that's actually not a great example
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it's just our name it's more michelle
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kare she makes challenge accepted better exactly sean evans and hot ones or amelia de moldenberg and chicken shop date exactly
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yeah okay you have the revenue pulled up so emma chamberlain episode it's three hours long mostly viewed on connected tv's take a guess twenty thousand dollars multiply
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that times three no way sixty thousand
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dollars that video from adsense alone made sixty thousand dollars yep so that probably also has a brand deal on it i assume i think that means that we we cleared well over one hundred thousand dollars on a sit down interview
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that's surprising actually that's crazy right but
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that's what's happening is that when you can invest and that's us there's other creators who do more views you know on their show when you can invest one hundred plus thousand dollars in an episode of content we've entered a new era right when you can when you can maybe confidently do that and i went on squawk box the morning of brandcast which is like cnbc business show and we've been on together once but andrew sorkin asked me he was like you know still the question is the economics of this how does it work and what i what i pushed back on is like i think i think we can all accept at this point that if you can drive attention there's economics to it but i do think the economics are more surprising than people maybe are are noticing right now because that's just adsense most sponsorships for a good show are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars an episode yeah and
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you know as a disclaimer that episode is what three years old yeah four years old and it's it's accrued viewership over time we've continued to play ads on that video so that's not like you can't expect that return immediately but the fact that we got sixty thousand dollars on a back catalog video that's three years old yeah is pretty incredible
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but i think needless to say throw out adsense even from sponsorship sure you're driving one hundred plus thousand dollars an episode which means you can spend that and that's changing the landscape now youtube's model what what was happening at brandcast which was fascinating was you know jesser went on stage and starts talking about his new show he gives the date of the show and then he's like and you can buy into it you know i've never seen that before where creators are on stage and they're giving like a direct call to action at
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brandcast to buy and is he saying you can integrate into my videos or you can with youtube buy advertising and make sure that it runs as my videos are coming out he's saying both
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things he's saying both things direct so so they showed case studies of direct creator integrations into the content they showed dude perfect with squad games they showed examples of dude perfect with different brands and how they were actually in the videos plus they talked about the new ad products of you know mid roll creator ads takeovers meaning media that's playing before creator videos with creators in them so it was a very dynamic presentation that went you know here's a creator here's the show they're making you can buy with us right now here's the
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different products you can buy by yep
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so this is a big change for how youtube engages with creators this public facing we are here to package shows with you and take them to market together with select creators it's very this
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is not a scaled operation where anyone who's uploading to youtube can have that pitch to advertisers brandcast is a very specific moment with advertisers in the room
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i think the variance of the types of shows that were announced was really interesting to me trevor noah announced a travel show and he was the host of brandcast and then you had alex cooper with the unwell network announcing about five unscripted reality shows you had dude perfect announcing squad games you had kareem rama the creator of subway takes announcing keep the meter running which which was a very new show to announce and so there was a lot of different shows the two very significant moments that i thought were dwyane wade came out on stage with jesser to talk about his new show and how it's like a pros versus joes format and dwyane wade plugs his youtube channel while he's on stage then you have draymond green come out with dude perfect and kind of on a side plugs his youtube channel and plugs the draymond green show and it had this feeling that everybody's making a show on youtube right now so i thought it was a very powerful brandcast and i thought it drove a lot of clarity as to what youtube is now can you recap the three forces yeah the three forces at play number one is connected tv watch time meaning the audience behavior now is that people turn on youtube on their tv that is driving people to make shows that you can settle into longer
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formats repeatable bingeable number two financing is matching ambition yes there's more sponsors in
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the space there's more advertising in the space and now there's a new model for select creators of going out to market and getting a sponsorship alongside or before you launch a show and then number three is abundance of content creating the need for marketing and packaging that's easy to remember so but you you just as a creator i don't think right now you can just live in this kind of abyss of you know even you look at casey neistat coming back to vlogging right now he's casey neistat he's like talent he can do whatever he wants and people will still watch but he can't be marketed in the way that all the creators at brandcast were just marketed because he's not making a show and there's just a really simple distinction between videos and shows which is just branding packaging format repeatability so yeah those are the three forces that i'm seeing so this is a
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pretty major shift on youtube you know we've been saying for a while youtube is the new tv but by that we really mean youtube is taking away watch time from what has traditionally been tv people are watching youtube on their tv's we're not necessarily saying that it is replacing fully the hollywood model the way content is distributed the networks but it's a pretty big deal for youtube now to come out and say hey
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these are our shows yeah this is that our creator slate that we in
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front of advertisers are saying is premium programming right but then these shows come out and they will do how they do yeah because it's youtube it's the numbers are not private right and so it's a little bit of a different dynamic i think and it's something to watch this year is these shows that youtube gets behind how do they actually perform and what does that mean for advertisers who are making the choice between youtube and somewhere else i think the
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question is though we don't know how content performs across televisions or across streaming platforms we don't know you know with netflix picking up pods and like we said before on the show like pods that have historically done thirty thousand views an episode on youtube like we don't
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know how but that works in its favor that audiences don't know i'm saying that this i think could potentially work against youtube creators potentially viewership yeah and i think a lot of people are taking this messaging of youtube is tv and financing shows and networks for youtube i mean just last week cole bennett launched his lyrical lemonade tv with lighthouse with lighthouse studios and that's going to be numerous shows that are released on the same channel on youtube which again is something that historically does not really work and it may work because maybe the moment has met youtube and audiences at the right time can i ask
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you a question yeah are we in a post view world it's a valid
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question saying does it even matter if something doesn't do well from a viewership
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perspective like if it feels premium if people enjoy it if the right people like it does it does it matter if it did fifty thousand views two hundred thousand views or a million views and i know that's a crazy question but the way things are marketed right now feels more important to me i
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mean tbpn would tell you that we're in a post view world for sure
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or that we're just in a niche
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world that we're in a very niche world well and that brand perception really matters i mean we were talking about tbpn yesterday i was looking at their show on youtube when it was live and it had two hundred fifty viewers watching on youtube and it had fifteen hundred on x and it sold for over one hundred million dollars dollars to
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openai yeah and more specifically one of the shows that was promoted at brandcast our friend kareem rama who's going to be on the show soon keep the meter running amazing show loved it absolutely
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two episodes are out right now they
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are phenomenal they are phenomenal and by the way lucas shaw from bloomberg wrote about keep the meter running wrote about brandcast and wrote that the show is excellent it's not easy to get lucas shaw to say the show is excellent it is an excellent show the the first episode has about fifty thousand views in a week i think that'll get to one hundred thousand views by next week and maybe eventually two hundred thousand views does that what does that mean
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well the second episode has maybe ten to fifteen i think twenty twenty thousand right now yeah so what does that mean for youtube to get up on stage and say this is a show that we believe is good that we're getting behind and then people to look at it on youtube in the days after and see viewership sub one hundred thousand i don't know and i mean
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i actually truly don't know the answer right now because i think it's good content i think it's well marketed and i think kareem is a good creator for the space traditionally what they've talked about is videos and creators who do in the five ten million range but even if we compare this to network television like there's a lot of network television that does one hundred thousand views mm right or even like business television like i don't know when i go on squawk box i have no idea how many people are watching that live truly no idea no idea it could be ten thousand it could be two thousand it could be fifty probably at
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least ten thousand people on treadmills and equinoxes let me tell you it's gotta
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be do you know who texted me within a minute of getting off who
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your brother exactly yeah my brother was definitely on a treadmill at a gym
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he texted me immediately downtown manhattan my parents banker exactly yeah those are the two texts i got immediately yeah so i think that's i really don't know the answer but i think what we saw at brandcast was like a move to marketing a move to curation of youtube and my curiosity unless you have
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something else on views i do i do i have one more thing i think the reason i kind of posed the question about views and bring it up is because when i saw youtube get behind and continue to get behind keep the meter running my first feeling after watching and loving the episode and seeing the viewership which is not low like this is a new show on a new channel that is a lot of people to have fifty thousand but relative to maybe some of the other shows that were announced at brandcast or talked about my first thought was man this is a great show shouldn't i open up youtube and shouldn't it take over the entire front page right masthead
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editorial promo market it in the environment not just outside of the environment yeah
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and you know as i think about it now i actually don't know how i feel about that because i think part of youtube is that they shouldn't maybe do that but yeah i also think if you want to compete with netflix and you believe you have good shows you have to use your real estate to surface some of these shows
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i agree with that so where i was going to go next was i was watching youtube tv over the weekend and i wanted to during a commercial break go watch youtube and then i started thinking about youtube premium which i think is something we don't talk about enough but like it's a massive subscription business for youtube there's premium there's tv and there's youtube those those are two apps on connect tv my thought is this is all gonna become one i think realistically we're gonna open up our tv's and there'll be a youtube app that will have live programming that could be from cable networks or could not be if you pay for that package there's premium with no ads and then there's youtube and my guess is that premium eventually maybe this is a hot take will have original shows so we're
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coming back to youtube red youtube originals
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youtube originals i think we're coming i mean even the way that they're talking about a brandcast feels kind of youtube originalsy well i i think i mean we have to remember good mythical morning came out of youtube originals right or something from mythical what was it so stevie oh right was hired because was
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hired because of their creative director yeah so it played a major part in good mythical morning having the infrastructure to be as consistent and as high quality as it's been but yeah no i i think you're probably right even to get down to the problem that i pose with marketing like to launch trevor noah's travel show but then just release it on youtube without much marketing right what happens to it he doesn't have historically a place for a show like that he has a podcast on youtube and he's very well known but like you know he again he's kind of like thrown to the wolves sometimes when you launch a new show like that or a new channel and so it requires a bit of marketing which requires more of a netflix style environment when you open up youtube now we're getting
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to algaetorial which was daniel x phrase on our on our show of is it algorithmic is it editorial yeah because we're getting we're getting blurred lines even with in in not necessarily on the platform yet but in the marketing of
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the shows exactly that's what i'm saying the marketing makes it feel like it's going to be more editorial or we've we've put a stake in the ground and said hey this is one of our shows you should watch it it's good yeah but then the distribution is same old youtube distribution which is difficult
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sometimes yeah we'll see what happens i'm curious to hear what you guys think
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but at the same time maybe it's just actually like hollywood where like look you get behind the shows and if
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they work if you go to them they go to them exactly and if
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they're good they're good and i believe keep the meter running is a great show it's only has it only has two episodes out yeah five years from now if he's still making if kareem is still making keep their meter running and it's still on youtube because the financing works i think it's going to be a massive show but lucas shaw also said that someone from hbo was next to him and was like this this should be on hbo the question
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is how does youtube keep it on youtube exactly and that that's going to come that that's going to come into play over the next year if youtube
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decides they want to pay to keep it on youtube then they got to market it to make sure it does exactly better and see and finds more
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people exactly yeah or package it well and sell it to someone yeah sell it to a brand okay i want to i want to transition to talk about io we just we're here at google io in mountain view we just saw the keynote this is our first time at io we came here in partnership with gemini a lot of updates and actually the day started out with some updates to youtube we should just talk quickly about the update to youtube
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search yeah so the update there is that you can now conversationally ask youtube what you're looking for so the example they give is you know a dad says hey i want to teach my kid how to ride a bike she already knows how to balance that's the prompt that is searched on youtube and then youtube comes back with a series of videos with exact step by step moments where you can drop in to learn the things you need so it comes back with four videos that start at different points that you can click into you're sort of following a journey of education via different youtube videos it's
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pretty dramatically different from search give me a thumbnail i have to choose based on the thumbnails where i want to
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click into it's more of an efficient way to get you the information yeah
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that's very it's it's very i would say that the two things that i noticed in the keynote today is utility like the internet becoming more efficient and more utilitarian and then more personalized and i think this is a bit of like personalization right like i i just need this moment from the video everything that was talked about on stage today at io is about personalization and i find that to be a really interesting future of the internet that actually plays in a in a fascinating way with what we saw with youtube what happened with youtube and brandcast is like hey maybe maybe there's too much content and it's like that you can go back down too many rabbit holes so let us just put a stake in the ground on which ones are our shows and then over here what we saw at io was like the internet is your canvas you can do whatever you want now like there was a demo where you search something in google this was insane and it comes back with a custom app based on your search so the example was like someone searching about like how does a black hole work and it came back with an interactive like interface where you can play around it teaches you how it works and then you're sliding things to see how it works and learning with an interactive app there was another one that
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was a meal tracker essentially where you're trying to track your meals for your diet and schedule your workouts and it was a custom app after you searched that you could then use to do
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this which is pretty incredible completely insane yeah i think the best update for me that i found to be like something i'm going to use immediately is through gemini spark which is like the agents that work in the background and i had this task called daily brief which essentially works within your google docs your gmail your calendar and spits out like here's what's going on in the day for you here's your priorities here's what you need to do what i find is creators especially us we have a lot going on we're not the most organized people that to me felt like a really interesting personalized use of the internet that i am excited about
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yeah some of those announcements were specifically very helpful for us because you and i have worked within the google suite basically since the beginning so i have files on top of files on top of google docs on top of slides on top of yeah i think spreadsheets like my yeah i need like conversational
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help with just looking through my stuff the other thing i thought was really interesting through spark was the ability to create a skill so actually like we can upload what's cool is like we have a bunch of guidelines of how we create stuff we have rules of how we create stuff we can upload those into gemini and have like skill to we can say hey i need to make a deck for this purpose
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or i need to write a script
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for this video exactly and it will do it in the style that you
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want to do it yeah use colin and samir's video skill exactly and we'll have written that out we'll have given it the rules and guidelines can edit
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based on that we have this two column script that we use which is here's what's being said and here's what's being shown so like here's here's verbal and here's visual and so we can use that now and go like here's here's our template like just fill this
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out and then another one of the major announcements was omni which is conversational video editing and i've used google flow before in the past you know even right now we're working on a car commercial and i'm working through the edit and there were certain shots that i needed of the car that has placeholders for shots that we needed to get there was this cool shot of like a map moving from one location to another and as i'm in the edit i use google flow to get those shots and then drop them in this brings a lot of those capabilities but just to gemini so conversational video editing you can also now start with a video of your own so they showed a demo where a guy is filming himself pov style he goes up to
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a mirror so demis yeah demis that of google deepmind but yeah or he's also just a guy yeah or a
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guy yeah fair goes up clicks on the mirror with his finger uploads that video and then says keep everything exactly the same but just change and make this one thing happen when he touches
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the glass i will say you showed me an edit last week that had a bunch of temp video in it that was from flow flow yeah and i had no idea which is actually insane yeah that's that's pretty insane that that's the case i'm going to say the craziest thing we've done so far
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today insane because i'm one hell of
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a prompter yeah just i was i was you turned to me at one point you were like you know those aren't our shots right you know i'm
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not even in this room right now
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the most insane thing was the live translation with the google smart glasses which
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we just did we just moments ago
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so we were wearing smart glasses and they have us walk up to this woman who then speaks korean but it reads out in english from the display inside the glasses that to me was one of the craziest things i've experienced
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i don't know if you felt this way but i really wanted to like
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continue the conversation yeah they made us
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move really fast but they were like that's all you do but i got stuff to say now like this is a once in a lifetime experience because she's speaking korean and then we're engaging and they were like yeah you've had
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enough so i assume that we were speaking in english and her glasses were translating to korean i think that's what was happening i wasn't that's crazy i don't know that's insane so okay it just feels like i found this to be really interesting because this week has been pinned by two you know alphabet events one being youtube brandcast one being google i o and both i haven't
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thought about the fact that the company's called alphabet in a long time took me by surprise yeah you took me by surprise i was like what are
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we talking about but they felt like they tell two stories of the future of the internet yeah one being the premium curated dictated by the platform right like here here's the shows that we think matter editorially and then the other which is personalized there was a slide
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in this presentation today at io that said do anything yeah that was the
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message though it was like literally do
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anything you can do anything yeah which
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which we haven't had the time yet but i just i kind of want to just play for a bit and play around with like building custom apps there was one that was like a date planner which i was like i
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saw you really perk yeah i really
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perked up there i was like that's good i want to do that where you can like organize a you know a date night because i think that's just something i need help with but yeah there's also a bit of overwhelm i would say there's there's a slight overwhelm of like the possibilities are absolutely
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endless yeah i i found myself a bit overwhelmed i was excited to sit down take three hours and explore all these new announcements um but i i i was like waiting for myself to have one thing i knew i wanted to do mm but it's hard when you can do anything yeah and i
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i think the reason why that matters so much especially as video creators is this is the environment now we are competing in for attention like i am feeling excited to get on my computer and build things that is a creative act and it is entertainment that is time on the internet that i will spend doing that which then again plays with the first thing which is you kind of got to tell me when i have the time and i turn on my tv what am i supposed to watch yeah those two things because
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i have less time than ever because
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i have less time than ever and if i don't know what to watch on youtube i'm going to go have some fun over here and build something build a custom app go to an interactive that was the interactive like map that you could play with that like you can ask a question and it will teach you gemini will teach you with this interactive graphic that you can
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poke around i was like do what
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what are textbooks yeah yeah this is crazy yeah so you could like learn anything and build anything and so i think there's there's some writing i want to do around this but i feel like these two announcements or these two events have told the story of the future of the internet in a really compelling way so that's what we wanted to share with you guys i think we're about to get kicked out of this room here at io we're ten minutes over ten minutes over so we
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gotta go okay okay what about okay
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wrap up we don't have any time we don't have any time all right well here's what i'll say from a
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wrap up take the transcript put it
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in gemini next week press publish la we haven't talked about it much mainly because we sold out and we sold out very fast and i don't know what to do because there's two hundred fifty applications and we're gonna have to turn them all down so if you applied and you didn't get in this time we will do more events but thank you to everyone who's coming i truly can't wait we will be summarizing all of what happens on stage with google gemini there will be videos there'll be photos we will tell you guys all about the event seriously thank you to everyone who's coming out there it's going to be great it's going to be awesome all right thanks for listening to this episode of the colin smear show we'll see you next week
May 20, 2026
Hosts: Colin and Samir
Location: Recorded at Google I/O, following attendance at YouTube Brandcast
In this energetic, insightful episode, Colin and Samir dig into the seismic shift in the creator economy: the rise of "creator shows" on YouTube. Drawing on their experiences at two major events—YouTube Brandcast in NYC and Google I/O in Silicon Valley—they unpack why YouTube now speaks the language of TV networks, how creators are pivoting to show-based content, and what new technology means for audience engagement. The pair also witness firsthand the latest in personalization and AI-powered tools at Google I/O, tying it all back to what it means for video creators.
Colin identifies three major drivers behind YouTube’s push for show-based content:
“It's a big change for how YouTube engages with creators—this public-facing ‘we are here to package shows with you and take them to market together.’” —Colin, (10:14)
For creators, audiences, and brands alike, the lines between TV, YouTube, and the wider internet have never been blurrier—or richer with opportunity. According to Colin and Samir, this is only the beginning of a new era for shows online.