Over the past four years, YouTube has paid creators, artists and media companies over $100 billion. That was one of the biggest headlines during the platform’s Made on YouTube event on Tuesday.
Made on YouTube has become the platform’s annual conference for tech updates that are coming for creators. And this year, it was all about AI. Another major headline? Soon every monetized creator on YouTube will be able to use AI to tell if someone is making unauthorized content using their likeness. The company announced that AI-driven likeness protection technology will be rolled out globally to all creators in YouTube’s Partner Program in the coming months.
The feature will be available through YouTube Studio and is currently in beta. It’s also far from the only tool YouTube added.
Consider this your roundup of the most noteworthy and game-changing announcements to come from YouTube’s annual gathering. Because there are a lot of them, the major announcements are broken down by platform and category.
YouTube Studio
In the next few weeks, all creators will receive access to collaborations. Much like Instagram’s collab functionality, users will be able to add collaborators to a single video, and that video can be shown to the audiences of all participating collaborators. Five creators at a time can be tagged in a YouTube collab.
A/B testing for video titles is underway with a global rollout planned before the end of the year. Testing has become a big part of the studio for creators. Since the option to A/B test thumbnails rolled out in 2023, creators have run over 15 million experiments.
YouTube is also implementing AI for Ask Studio and an auto-dubbing lip sync option. Ask Studio will be available in the U.S. in the coming weeks and lets users talk to a chatbot to better understand specific insights about their community. As for the auto-dubbing option, the platform is experimenting with using lip sync technology to visually align a speaker’s mouth with the dubbed language. This technology is currently in a limited test. As of August 2025, over 60 million videos have already been auto-dubbed across 20 languages. And YouTube has found that viewers seem to like this auto-dubbing option. From December of last year to August, the company found that viewers spent over 75% of their average viewing time watching the autodubbed video versus the original.
Live streaming and podcasting
This year, the real areas where YouTube is expanding into are the worlds of live streaming and podcasting. In the past 12 months the company found that the number of YouTube channels earning $100,000 or more in revenue from TV screens increased by 45%. A big reason for that growth is the increased popularity of livestreamed content. Over 30% of daily logged-in YouTube viewers watched live content in the second quarter of 2025.
A new AI-powered tool will automatically pull portions of live streams for Shorts creators, an option that helps creators repackage their content for other videos and platforms. That will be available to all mobile creators in the next few weeks. Live streaming creators will also be given the option to practice their stream before they go live, react to live to content on YouTube in real time and more easily transition viewers from a public to a private live stream. Ads for live streams will also be available later this year. This side-by-side option for desktop and TV will let creators incorporate an ad into their stream with minimal viewer disruption.
Finally, creators will be able to stream both horizontally and vertically at the same time with a shared chat for commenters. That means a creator’s livestream has a better chance of reaching viewers, whether they prefer to watch on their YouTube feed or their Shorts feed. YouTube is currently experimenting with combining chats and expects to expand this option to more creators in the coming months.
As for podcasts, YouTube shared that viewers watch over 100 million hours of podcasts daily. More than 30% of those views start as a livestream. The platform will also be using AI to let podcasters pull clips of their podcasts. This option will be available for Shorts early next year. YouTube is also rolling out an AI tool for audio-focused podcasters that will allow them to create a customizable video for episodes. This feature will be available to select creators early next year with a larger expansion planned in 2026.
YouTube Shorts
Another major area for technological innovation is YouTube Shorts, which currently averages 200 billion daily views.
Veo 3 — Google’s most sophisticated AI model to date — will be implemented into Shorts, allowing creators to make videos with audio and improve their video quality while introducing better prompt matching. Best of all, Veo 3 will be entirely free for Shorts creators to use. The tool is currently rolling out in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. In the coming months, Veo will offer Shorts’ users more capabilities, like the ability to animate AI-created characters.
Shorts is also rolling out speech to song, a remixing tool that lets creators turn dialogue from eligible videos into soundtracks. Users will also be able to edit with AI in the YouTube Create app. Voiceovers in English and Hindi will rollout for creators in the following months.
Shopping and brand deals
Last but never least has to do with how all of these creators are getting paid. Over the next year, eligible U.S.-based creators will be able to use auto tagging. The feature uses AI to automatically find and tag eligible products mentioned in videos.
Shorts’ creators will also be able to add a link to a brand’s site starting later this year with rollout continuing into next year. This could prove to be a massive game changer for Shorts, putting it on more even ground with TikTok when it comes to brand partnerships and sales.
