#youtube

#youtube

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.

The most telling point (so far) of Netflix's proposed acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, HBO and streaming businesses came from the company itself. In pushing back on claims that the deal would be anti-competitive, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters pointed to YouTube as a bona fide rival that it would still trail with Warner Bros stack - a point that would've sounded far-fetched not that long ago.

Billboard uses an outdated formula that weights subscription-supported streams higher than ad-supported. This doesn't reflect how fans engage with music today and ignores the massive engagement from fans who don't have a subscription,

YouTube creators are able to tag their videos as sponsored content within the upload flow, which will add a "Paid promotion" label to the relevant video clip/s.

the company removed dozens of videos featuring Deadpool, Moana, Mickey Mouse, Star Wars characters and other Disney IP as of Friday, just days after Disney accused it of "infringing Disney's copyrights on a massive scale." The letter, seen by both publications earlier this week, called out Google not just for hosting these videos on YouTube, but also for using copyrighted works to train models including Veo and Nano Banana.

While not every Open Cul­ture read­er dreams of mov­ing to Japan and becom­ing a wood­block print­mak­er, it's a safe bet that at least a few of you enter­tain just such a fan­ta­sy from time to time. David Bull, a British-Born Cana­di­an who got his first expo­sure to the art of ukiyo‑e in his late twen­ties, actu­al­ly did it. Though he's been liv­ing in Japan and steadi­ly pur­su­ing his art there since 1986, only in recent years has he become known around the world.

Though it's a little bit different than platforms where all users have profiles and post their own content, the most-visited social media site in the U.S. is actually YouTube. The survey of just over 5,000 U.S. adults found that 84% said they had used YouTube, the highest amount of any platform. For context, the next-highest percentage, (71%) goes to Facebook. These two platforms dominate social media usage, per the survey, with about half of U.S. adults saying they visit YouTube and/or Facebook daily.