YouTube chief executive Neal Mohan named two long-term bets for the next couple of years - accelerating the brand-creator economy, including an affiliate program in 35 countries by the end of 2026, and AI built on Gemini - in a post-show interview recorded at Made on YouTube on September 23, 2026 and published on September 30. Creators on the same show, including Marques Brownlee and Paddy Galloway, were less certain about what the new testing tools will do to their videos.

In Short

YouTube's boss and several big creators sat down after YouTube's yearly creator event to talk about the new tools, like testing two versions of the same video and showing different thumbnails to different people. YouTube's boss said the company's main bets are getting brands to pay creators more and using AI, while some creators worried the testing tools could make every video feel the same. Nothing changes in your feed yet, because most of these tools have no release date, but brands and creators now know where YouTube is putting its money.

The show and its guests

The recording is titled "YouTube just changed: What you need to know." It was published on September 30, 2026, jointly by the Creator Insider and YouTube Creators channels, and carried the #MadeOnYouTube tag. When the page was captured, it showed 73,281 views. The show runs to five chapters, hosted by Colin and Samir, who describe it as "the Made on YouTube post show."

The hosts open by stating that YouTube "just announced over 30 updates to the platform right here on stage." Mohan's own reference to "the announcements with Amazon today" indicates the conversations were recorded on the day of the event, September 23, a week before the video went live.

According to the video description, the guests were Neal Mohan; the musician Troye Sivan; Julian Shapiro-Barnum of Celebrity Substitute; Chucky Appleby of the MrBeast team; Marques Brownlee (MKBHD); the YouTube strategist Paddy Galloway; and the Shorts creator Jenny Hoyos. The transcript is machine-generated, and several names are misspelled in it (Mohan appears as "Neil Mahan" and "Neil Mullen", Sivan as "Troy Savon", Galloway as "Patty Galloway"). This article uses the spellings from the video description.

PPC Land covered the wider Made on YouTube slate on September 24, including the affiliate expansion, Shorts series, personalised comment moderation and live dubbing pilots. What the post show adds is something the official blog posts did not: on-camera reactions from creators who will use these tools daily, and Mohan's own ranking of what matters.

Mohan's three buckets

Asked to name the three biggest updates for creators, Mohan grouped them instead. The first bucket is AI inside YouTube Studio. "Everything that we're doing for creators in studio itself using the power of AI, using Gemini, which is something that, you know, we've talked about before that I've alluded to at previous maidons, I think is really just coming to fruition," he said, listing "dynamic thumbnails, um, AB testing of videos" and "the new insights that you can tease out of studios."

The second is fandom. "People tell me over and over that it's about that authentic connection with your audience," Mohan said, citing "everything from comments to communities, member onlyly communities" (the caption likely renders "members-only communities"). Paid memberships underpin that tier of the platform.

The third covers discovery: "live autodubbing, you know, watch with, all of those things, custom feeds." He called custom feeds "a huge win for all of us as viewers," adding: "I'm going to use that feature over and over, but it's another way for creators to get discovered as well."

Then came what he described as the piece "that really ties it all together." In his words: "connecting creators with brands, creating those business opportunities for creators, I think is a huge opportunity because creators really are the most trusted voice uh for their fans, for their audiences, and brands really want in on that."

Two bets for the next couple of years

The hosts quoted back two earlier bets Mohan had cited on stage: that people would watch YouTube on television screens, and that they would watch podcasts rather than only listen. Mohan said the living-room bet "was a bet that we made even before COVID" and had "proven out to actually be the right bet."

For the period ahead, he named two. The first: "accelerate the creator economy by that brand creator connection. So whether that's through sponsorships, creator partnerships, scaling out our affiliate programs." He tied it to a specific number. "You saw the announcements with Amazon today, the fact that we're going to be in 35 countries by the end of the year with our affiliate program."

That figure matches the written materials. PPC Land's September 24 report put the affiliate program at 15 countries in early August, set to reach 35 by December 2026. The growth has been rapid. YouTube lowered the affiliate threshold to 500 subscribers on March 27, 2026, when the program covered 12 countries, and opened it to UK creators with six retailers on August 6, the 15th market. Twenty more countries in under five months would more than double the footprint.

The Amazon reference concerns tagging. Amazon tagging on YouTube went live for US creators on August 27, with commissions locking monthly and paid through AdSense two cycles later; at Made on YouTube, the company said the feature would extend to India and Brazil. Mohan said affiliates should be seen as "a long-term concerted bet for uh YouTube for for on behalf of our creators."

The second bet is AI. "Everything that I just alluded to around studio, things like custom feeds, ask YouTube, like they're new ways for creators and fans and audiences to interact with each other," he said. "And uh they're all powered by our partnership with Google DeepMind, our investment in Gemini, Gemini Omni on the video side." YouTube had already brought Gemini Omni and personal avatars to Shorts at Google I/O in May.

Where the money is

Asked how he would run a creator media company, Mohan returned to brand work. "I have never seen more activity around the creator economy and what creators stand for and brands participating in it than I do today," he said. Creator companies, in his view, would find "the opportunities there I think are going to be very large and they're going to be very varied in terms of how brands want to work with you."

For advertisers, the emphasis is consistent with product changes already in place. YouTube Creator Partnerships replaced BrandConnect in seven markets on March 24, 2026, and the Made on YouTube slate added a one-click code that lets brands view performance and run paid media behind creator content. Mohan's framing places brand deals and affiliate commissions, not ad revenue share, at the centre of YouTube's creator pitch. That matters because ad revenue is about to get harder to reach: new Partner Program applicants will need 8,000 watch hours or 20 million Shorts views from February 1, 2027, double the previous bars, while Shopping and Creator Partnerships stay at 500 subscribers.

Dynamic thumbnails, explained by the people who announced them

Shapiro-Barnum presented the video testing and dynamic thumbnail features on stage, and PPC Land detailed them on September 27: up to three video cuts tested on real viewers with retention curves, and up to three thumbnails served to different audience segments. Neither has a release date.

On the show, he described the shift plainly. "In the old days, you would upload a thumbnail for your video and that would be the thumbnail until the end of time," he said. Now, "you can upload different thumbnails for the same video that target different audiences because YouTube understands our audiences will respond and react to different things and so your video can have different thumbnails for different people."

How YouTube decides which audience sees which thumbnail was not explained on the show, and it was not stated in YouTube's written materials either.

Appleby, who works on packaging for MrBeast, offered a concrete example. In a video where contestants were chained together, "we had someone chained to a grandma and a biker. So, maybe a grandma will click on the grandma." A biker, he continued, "might actually like click on it because he's a biker." His summary: "it just allows you to reach different audiences really easily."

Shapiro-Barnum saw a split between new and returning viewers for a guest-led show. "To draw in new people, it might make sense to really highlight the guest on the episode, but if you've already been subscribed to the channel, you know me," he said.

A workaround becomes a feature

Galloway, who consults for large channels, said creators had been improvising this for years. "A lot of people like me maybe Marquez as different creators have been trying to like sort of duct tape this feature already behind the scenes for years," he said. His method was to assume that in "the first few days probably my video is going to be seen by more core viewers. Therefore maybe I have a more core thumbnail. Then after maybe 48 hours I'll switch it."

He called the approach "pretty ineffective cuz we know now that you know YouTube will surface a video to new viewers from minute one as well." Brownlee described his own audience in the same two-bucket terms: "people who are subscribed already and are going to watch pretty early and then there's people who are somewhere down the line in a purchase decision who are here for the utility or they're a new viewer."

Galloway called the release "the biggest update we've had in years," and singled out the retention curves in video testing. "We can actually see it's not just you know taking their word for it that oh this video got more watch time," he said. "We can see specifically where you know video A outperformed video B in the retention curve."

Brownlee's doubts

The most sceptical remarks came from Brownlee, who has, by the hosts' count, over 20 million subscribers and more than a decade on YouTube. His concerns went to two features.

Ask YouTube and review videos

Ask YouTube is the AI assistant in YouTube's search. It reached signed-in US desktop users on July 6 for English searches, and Made on YouTube previewed product data, comparison tables and visual search with timestamps. Brownlee, whose channel centres on product reviews, said the stage demonstration "was pretty much right up my alley."

He described it as a tool that "parachutes you into the middle to answer a question and then you can peace out." His reaction was split. "At first I was like okay that's very useful as a viewer but what does that do to the experience of watching a video?" he said. "I feel like we try to make entertaining videos. Does that sort of remove some of the context of how I got to that answer?"

He conceded the arithmetic could cut either way. "For the person who's just there for the information, they will watch less of the video because of this feature, but they may have watched less no matter what," he said. One host proposed the optimistic reading: viewers who would never have clicked might "arrive at the video, watch 12 seconds, and then leave."

No data was offered on either side. YouTube has not said how Ask YouTube jumps are counted in watch time or analytics, and that is the question review creators and the brands sponsoring them will want answered. For retailers, it cuts the other way: an assistant that skips to the verdict on a camera flash sits closer to the purchase than a 15-minute review.

Testing and the loss of niche

Brownlee's second concern was broader. With thumbnail A/B tests, he said, "a small difference between thumbnails doesn't really help me learn very much. It's incentivizing me to test a larger difference between thumbnails to really learn something." He expected video testing to push the same way, towards "drastically different videos."

He then described the risk in specific terms. A creator's quirks, he said, "niches you down and it makes you the most relatable to that small audience. But when you actively try to reach as many people as possible, you start to remove that niche. Oh, it's dubbed to every language." His example: "it's baseball cars in this video for certain viewers who like baseball, but it's race car pictures for the people who like race car. And like everything starts to become more generalized away from your core."

He did not reach a verdict. "I don't know exactly what I think about that or how I feel about that yet," he said. "It's just where my brain goes when I see these features, but um I will be testing them."

Galloway, whom the hosts called "one of the faces of of optimizing," admitted his bias: "When I see a tool like that, I basically salivate." He also said testing is not universal even for his clients. "There are times where we have high conviction in a concept and we don't use thumbnail testing. You know, it's probably like 20 30% of the time."

His argument for the tools was that they lower the cost of risk. Before thumbnail testing, he said, creators clung to rules like "my thumbnail always has to have a red arrow." Testing let them "murder my darlings now." With intros, creators often refuse to experiment because "every video is so high stakes."

YouTube's own figure suggests the habit is entrenched. In the Made on YouTube materials, the company cited over 40 million title and thumbnail experiments since 2024. The company extended A/B testing from thumbnails to titles in late 2025, and custom Shorts thumbnails arrived on July 25, 2026 without testing.

Small channels and sample size

Galloway was blunt about who benefits. Speaking to small creators using thumbnail tests, he said: "realistically the data set is going to be so small that you're not going to get that much benefit from the actual test." He saw value in the discipline of making three thumbnails per video, but added that "people still grossly underestimate how many videos you have to post to break out."

He pointed to Brownlee, whose first video dates to 2009, and put his output at "1,800 videos later." The machine captions are inconsistent on the number, so the figure is Galloway's on-air estimate rather than a verified count.

YouTube has not published minimum traffic levels for either video testing or dynamic thumbnails. If tests return little signal below a certain audience size, the features will matter most to large channels and the agencies that run them.

Comments, community and GIFs

Hoyos, who said she has over 12.4 million subscribers and five Shorts with over 100 million views each, listed "gifts and comments" as the most important update. The machine caption is almost certainly a mishearing of "GIFs in comments", which YouTube presented in a Creator Insider video on September 25 with Hoyos as host. That feature did not appear in YouTube's written Made on YouTube briefing.

She also named "the new community moderation tool that is going to understand the way that I like to what I like in my community and what I don't," which she said is "going to be helpful beyond just like having words as filters." The written briefing describes personalised comment moderation as opt-in, holds similar comments for review, and enters a desktop experiment later in 2026.

For Hoyos, comments are part of how a video performs. "A video becomes infinitely funnier because of the comments," she said. "People are going to stay on the video longer because they're reading the comments." She plans for them in advance. "I create content intentionally thinking about what I want people to comment because if there's nothing to comment or engage about, then did you actually have a memorable video?"

Her account of Shorts traced a shift in format. Early on, Shorts were made by "long form creators who have studios and production companies" releasing "basically just short versions of their long form videos." Now, she said, the format is "less produced", and she meant that as praise. "If I want to create polished content, that's going to long form. And short form is to build a community."

Sivan and the slow build

The Sivan chapter was less about the announcements and more about the platform's history. He said his first upload came in 2007 after he sang at a shopping centre in Perth and a cousin in South Africa told him about YouTube. A video response he recorded to a song by the singer Lisa Lavie (captioned as "Lisa Levie") reached about a thousand views, "because it was attached to her video."

"I still like to this day have never had a single moment of like virality that changed my life," Sivan said, describing his path as "this like kind of brick by brick approach." On the pressure to produce volume, he said the error is to "start trying to play the game of trying to think about, okay, well, what do people want and how can I make that?"

The remark sits uneasily next to the testing tools discussed in the other chapters, which are built precisely to measure what people want.

Why the show matters for marketers

Three points stand out for advertisers, agencies and publishers.

First, YouTube's chief executive placed brand partnerships and affiliate commerce at the top of the company's creator agenda, alongside AI, and attached a deadline: 35 affiliate countries by the end of 2026. Brands paying creators are being asked to treat YouTube as a commerce channel, not only a reach channel.

Second, dynamic thumbnails will change what a single video looks like to different viewers. A sponsored video might carry three packaging variants, which raises questions YouTube has not answered: whether brands can approve each variant, whether reporting splits by thumbnail, and how disclosure applies across them. YouTube said on September 3 that it will label brand deals that creators fail to disclose.

Third, AI search sits between the viewer and the video. Brownlee's worry about Ask YouTube concerns watch time, but sponsors have the same exposure. An integration placed in the opening minutes of a review may never be seen if the assistant drops viewers at the verdict. Live auto dubbing, also on Mohan's list, extends the same videos into languages where sponsor messages were never written.

None of this has release dates. Most of the Studio features were described as "coming soon," and YouTube has not published eligibility rules for video testing or dynamic thumbnails. The post show offers the clearest public record so far of how the creators expected to adopt them view the trade-offs.

Timeline

Summary

Who: YouTube chief executive Neal Mohan, hosts Colin and Samir, and creators Troye Sivan, Julian Shapiro-Barnum, Chucky Appleby, Marques Brownlee, Paddy Galloway and Jenny Hoyos.

What: A post-show discussion of the over 30 updates YouTube set out at Made on YouTube 2026. Mohan named brand-creator commerce, including an affiliate program in 35 countries by the end of 2026, and Gemini-based AI as YouTube's two long-term bets. Creators welcomed video A/B testing and dynamic thumbnails but raised concerns about Ask YouTube reducing watch time on review videos and testing pushing channels away from their niche.

When: Recorded at Made on YouTube on September 23, 2026, and published on September 30, 2026.

Where: On the Creator Insider and YouTube Creators YouTube channels, following YouTube's annual creator event.

Why: YouTube is steering creator income towards brand deals and affiliate commissions while tightening ad revenue entry rules, and its new AI and testing tools change how videos are packaged, found and watched, with consequences for sponsors that YouTube has not yet addressed.