The race to advance conversational AI in the living room is heating up, with YouTube being the latest to expand its tool to smart TVs, gaming consoles, and streaming devices. This experimental feature, previously limited to mobile devices and the web, now brings conversational AI directly to the largest screen in the home, allowing users to ask questions about content without leaving the video they're watching.
YouTube is the Hunger Games of attention. Twenty million new videos compete for visibility every day against over 5 billion already on the platform. Whatever survives that level of competition is the most valuable attention in media. Unlike other platforms, viewers arrive with a purpose. They come to watch something specific, from creators they follow. That's a fundamentally different relationship than a scroll-based feed.
YouTube continues to vacuum up digital advertising dollars, mostly at the expense of traditional TV ad budgets, notching its biggest-ever ad sales number to date for the fourth quarter of 2025. However, the video giant's ad haul came in below Wall Street forecasts. In the last three months of the year, YouTube's global ad revenue totaled $11.38 billion, a year-over-year increase of 8.7%, parent company Alphabet reported. Wall Street analysts on average forecast YouTube ad revenue coming in at $11.84 billion, per StreetAccount.
Nope, not " Melania" - though the sort-of-documentary about the first lady did do better than industry folks had projected, bringing in $7 million in its first weekend. The real hit of the weekend was made by someone you probably haven't heard of, unless you are a very specific kind of online person: " Iron Lung," a horror/sci-fi movie, written, directed by, and starring Mark Fischbach, known to his fans as Markiplier on YouTube, where he has 38.2 million subscribers.
Al Jazeera has condemned YouTube's compliance with an Israeli law banning the network's livestreams in the country, warning that the move signals how major tech companies can be co-opted as instruments of regimes hostile to freedom. YouTube's submission to Israel's ban became apparent on Wednesday, days after Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karahi ordered a 90-day extension of an existing ban on the network's operations in Israel, blocking broadcasting and internet companies from carrying the network's content.
Bruce arrives on a job, checks out the problem ("she is chock-a-block, mate!"), and starts methodically working that problem until he solves it, which inevitably involves firing up "the bloody jet" to blast through blockages with 5,000 psi of water pressure ("Go, you good thing!"). This being Australia, he'll occasionally encounter not just cockroaches but poisonous spiders and snakes. And he's caught so many facefulls of wastewater and sewage while jetting that he really ought to invest in a hazmat suit.
Both YouTube's size and its ability to distract are a result of its most important feature - that it allows anyone to become a broadcaster. Because of this strategy, and the digital media revolution in general, there has been a shift in how we all consume media over the past few years. For example, with regards to broadcast media, CNN has 61,000 subscribers on YouTube, yet the otherwise unknown Young Turks news channel (the bombastic, longest standing all online American politics show),
McCullough's videos focus on U.S. and Canadian culture and how they intersect. A sampling of recent videos: "How bad is the PragerU guide to presidents?", "What 2025 permanently added to American culture," "whatever happened to Canada's Online Streaming Act?", and the four presidents that lead America into (and out of) war. His audience is around 80% male, with most of his viewers between the ages of 20 and 35 and about half based in the U.S.
YouTube is just as wary of the rise of AI slop as you, and that's why more AI-generated content is coming to the platform in the near future. In a lengthy outlining YouTube's 2026 plans, CEO Neal Mohan said the company will continue to embrace this new "creative frontier" by soon allowing its creators to throw together Shorts using their AI-generated likeness.
YouTubers have been increasingly frustrated with Google's management of the platform, with disinformation welcomed back and an aggressive push for more AI (except where Google doesn't like it). So it's no surprise that creators have been up in arms over the suspicious removal of YouTube's advanced SRV3 caption format. You don't have to worry too much just yet-Google says this is only temporary, and it's working on a fix for the underlying bug.
Let's be honest: people place a little too much pressure on mornings. You've heard the advice. "Develop a morning routine!" "Set intentions!" "The quality of your entire day hinges upon what you do immediately after waking up!" It's not that this is bad advice. It's just a little perfectionist-y. And chances are, your real life mornings don't feel as picturesque as Cinderella waking up and having a family of bluebirds bathe and dress her.
But I realized that rather than avoiding YouTube altogether, I could reshape how I use it. So I did just that: I put certain rules around it, stopped clicking around, and, while still using the same videos, it quickly stopped feeling like a temptation. YouTube is now part of my workspace, and I don't have to juggle several productivity apps.
Google is once again part of Movies Anywhere, meaning that movies you've purchased from Google Play and YouTube will now show up as part of your Movies Anywhere collection. Films from Google Play and YouTube became unavailable on Movies Anywhere on October 31st, but now they should sync to your account again. "Support for Google as a digital retailer has been re-enabled," Movies Anywhere says in a support page.
Since launching Shorts, we've been listening closely to your feedback on how to improve the viewing experience. We've heard that you often use 'Dislike' and 'Not interested' interchangeably on Shorts, or aren't sure what the differences are. To address this, and to better match with how people typically interact with short-form video feeds today, we're experimenting with options where 'Dislike' and 'Not Interested' are merged into one 'thumbs down' icon behind the three dot menu.
We've also had a lot of great questions and comments this year from you, our audience. It's now an annual tradition for us to turn the tables on Nilay for our final episode of the year, so we pulled together all the feedback we've received on topics like CarPlay, Monday episode guest suggestions, and - of course - AI. We also received a lot of great questions over the last few weeks asking about how Decoder is put together,
Songs streamed on YouTube will no longer count towards the Billboard charts, the platform announced in a blog yesterday (December 17). The change will take effect on January 16, 2026, according to Lyor Cohen, YouTube's global head of music. Cohen blamed a long-running dispute over Billboard 's decision to weight subscriber streams more favorably than ad-supported streams in its chart tallies.
Alphabet is best known for Google, which is the most dominant search engine on the planet. Google commands an approximate 90% market share in search, in large part due to the distribution advantages it has. The company owns both the world's leading web browser in Chrome and the No. 1 smartphone operating system in Android. Alphabet also has a search revenue-sharing deal with Apple to be the default search on all its devices.
