The race to dominate the AI It has many legs And, one of them is undoubtedly developing The perfect search engine. There is also a clear intention of several technological giants by Destrone Google in one of your most prolific businesses. However, Google is not passed without doing anything while the AI career advances by leaps and bounds. In fact, it has an ace in the sleeve that perhaps few have seen coming: YouTube. And it is that the video platform could become the most powerful weapon of the company to continue growing in AI.
The searches conquer. Google knows that artificial intelligence can be an existential threat to its search engine, the main source of income of the company for decades. That’s why he has been vitaminating Gemini and joining his abilities to Search through summaries with Ai overViews either The full search engine with AI that the company plans to launch soon worldwide. Meanwhile, chatgpt and other language models eat the toast with very useful capabilities for users, such as being able to answer user questions directly While searches are made On the Internet without clicking links or advertising.
A perfect shield. However, YouTube works radically differently, since here the AI is not a threat, but A competitive advantage. And while the search engine must deal with chatbots from other companies, YouTube can use AI in its favor to generate more content, improve its recommendations algorithm and, above all, multiply their monetization opportunities. All this knowing that it is a platform without any serious rival to date.
Video against text. Analyst Ben Thompson, from the specialized media Stratechery, Point out That video is an inherently more monetizable format than the text, and the recent history of social networks demonstrates it. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram began as text and photos, but they have all ended up focusing on the video because it is what really hooks most users. Tiktok understood from the beginning: The most addictive content does not come from your contact network, but from an algorithm that shows you the most entertaining videos, wherever they come from. And YouTube has been doing exactly for almost two decades.
Numbers that speak for themselves. YouTube It is the most watched streaming service on televisionsahead of Netflix. It is the dominant mobile application and computer for video consumption. And, above all, he has paid More than 100,000 million dollars to creators in the last four years. That figure does not even include the income that creators obtain for collaborations with brands, which usually overcome what they earn by advertising. YouTube is no longer just a platform, but an entire economy
AI as an accelerator, not as a threat. Google is integrating the technology of its Deepmind division directly on YouTube, and the results are promising. The platform He has just announced tools based on I see 3its video generation model, which allow any user to create clips for YouTube Shorts from the mobile and for free. The result? A content tsunami generated by AI That, although mostly it will be irrelevant, annoying and ends up subtracting authenticity from the platform, it will also generate more videos in less time and, in large part, their tools can be used so that creators use them to generate really good videos. And YouTube already has its own algorithm to separate the grain from the straw.
Each element of a video is a business opportunity. But Google’s master play with AI on YouTube has nothing to do with creating videos, but by monetizing them. The company has started trying A system that uses artificial intelligence to automatically identify products that appear in the videos and label them at the exact moment in which they are mentioned or shown. “Each element of each YouTube video is on its way to becoming a monetizable surface,” assures Thompson. Imagine to see a video of home reforms and be able to buy with a single click any tool that appears, even if it is in the background. It is the humid dream of every marketing giant.
An invisible giant. Sometimes we forget YouTube. In fact, many analysts, including Thompson, who even He recognizes itThey have underestimated the platform for years. Most people prefer to consume entertainment in video and YouTube format have always been there, growing unstoppable and sometimes even invisible.
The finish line, applied by Google. Thompson already He warned months ago about the potential of the AI to convert each content pixel into advertising inventory, but then thought of a goal. The irony is that Google, who arrived late by offering the mass public tools of generative after Bard’s disastrous launchit is now who has arrived first with this technology. As assures Thompson, goal must still develop the necessary models and infrastructure; Google already has them working.
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