Understanding YouTube’s Multi-Language Strategy with Mateo Price

Last week, YouTube announced it was rolling out support for multi-language dubbed videos, a move many have interpreted as a strategy to help creators grow their international audiences with just one channel.

How it works: Creators who want to offer their videos in multiple languages using YouTube’s new multi-language audio feature partner with third-party providers (such as dubbing service CreatorGlobal—more on that in a sec) to record audio tracks in the language(s) of their choosing. They can then add the different tracks through YouTube’s Subtitles Editor tool. And from there, audiences go global.

We wanted to understand how this new feature might open up a new cottage industry and potentially change the path of a YouTuber hoping to grow their audience. So the Publish Press’s Nathan Graber-Lipperman hopped on the phone with Mateo Price, who works on special projects with MrBeast and leads strategy at MrBeast’s dubbing service, CreatorGlobal.

Here’s their conversation →

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: YouTube announced multi-language audio last week. There was a blog post, the video Rene Ritchie did with MrBeast, TechCrunch’s coverage. But what did they all miss?

Mateo Price: I think by design they miss this, the second order effect of all this happening or just like what this is going to lead to: So people are taking Thursday’s news and they're, like, “Cool, I can have multiple audio tracks on my videos on one channel. That's pretty cool. Feature might take me less time to do stuff, instead of running separate channels."

But the exciting piece is not just this news, but also what this means is to come. So, we can picture a world where, you know, sometime later this year, you can also change thumbnails by language on your channel. In a year, we should hopefully be at a point where you can change video tracks by language, which just opens up a completely new door.

Like this: “Well, we have our English version in Spanish. We're actually cutting out this part of the video for the Spanish version. Made it a slightly different edit with its own brand deal sponsoring the Spanish version of the video.”

Or, say you want to put your content on YouTube Kids and now you have a PG version of the track, or a director's cut version.

This type of functionality has long-term bigger effects than just different languages. Even Colin and Samir, they can't do it today because you need the video to be the same length. But their podcast…when they upload a podcast in a year, they hopefully should have the 10-minute version—the quick highlights—then they should do the whole thing for different people.

What's going to turn this announcement into something that has real staying power and true excitement for a lot of creators? Just better functionality of being able to leverage the concept of multi-language audio.

What is Multi-Language Audio?

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: It's that whole idea of “supercharging” that one video, right? It's just a more customizable experience for the viewer.

Mateo Price: Correct. And I have an additional answer to what was missed, too. Because I don't even know if [MrBeast] mentions it in the video or not, but if you already have multiple languages for your content or you're thinking about it, having it all on one channel is just better for performance than having it across several.

That's not mentioned at all. YouTube's like, “Oh, people who are using this are getting more watch time.” Well, in theory, if they had a second channel, they also might get more watch time.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: Right.

Mateo Price: But what's happening is when you have all of these views and all this watch time coming to one channel instead of two or six or however many different foreign language channels there are, it creates a snowball effect. In terms of the co-watch between your Spanish channel, these Spanish viewers, and on your Russian channel, Russian viewers…it's everywhere.

And so even for us, when we moved all the channels into one place, not only did the viewers come over, we're getting more viewers than we pretty much ever had when we just had these separate foreign language channels.

So what's missing? This isn't just a cool, “Oh, that's a nice feature.” For people who are going to do this, you can get more views, more reach, more revenue than you could have previously. Which to me is a big win for a lot of creators.

YouTube Invests in Automation

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: Yeah, and one thing I picked up from the announcement was the aspect of the video titles and descriptions, right? Like if I speak Spanish and I'm searching on YouTube, didn't they say that the titles and description are gonna auto-change to Spanish?

Mateo Price: Yeah.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: Then a video that was produced in English is now going to become easier to find.

The second thing: If Spanish-speaking people are watching a MrBeast video and they have a great AVD…then it's gonna recommend it to more Spanish-speaking people, right? So that's kind of the snowball effect you're talking about.

Mateo Price: Exactly. And the snowball effect is not only that but then it's also, “Oh, hey, we realized that these Spanish viewers have the same preferences as these French viewers when previously we never had any connection here.”

So now, “Oh, it's working in Spanish, this video. Well, let's start showing it to even more French people. Oh, these people are connected with the Arabic audience too. So let's start showing it,” and it just all compounds together in a positive way, which is really cool.

What, to me, was also missed in the announcement—unless you felt like this was super intuitive—is that this is all automatic. This is built so that if you're a Spanish viewer and you see our channel, you're gonna see our titles in Spanish, our descriptions in Spanish, and a video that starts playing in Spanish. There's no click English on “$1 Vs $1,000,000 Hotel” and going to Settings > Audio Tracks > Spanish. Alright, now it's in Spanish…hell no, that’d be a sub-optimal experience.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: Yeah, it defaults to your native language.

Mateo Price: It's really defaulted. And YouTube is still figuring it out, but that to me is also just a huge win of like, “Hey, what's gonna happen?” Probably sometime a year from now, you can have truly indistinguishable channels. And to me, there’s no concept of a second-class user experience.

It will still exist in the short term for viewers watching not in the native language of the creator. Like with Beast, our comments are still probably going to be diluted by English ones. You can't change the thumbnail yet, you can't translate the community tab or things of that nature.

But those are all things that sometime—probably before the end of this year—will be completely solved. And then all of a sudden, if I'm a Spanish viewer who's never heard of MrBeast, I get shown a MrBeast video…I guess you can potentially tell this is dubbed.

But in theory, the channel banner, the description, the title of the thumbnail, the audio track, it should all default to how you want to see it. Which is kind of crazy.

It's like SpongeBob. I have a friend at Beast who's like, “I thought SpongeBob was a Dutch show because I grew up watching it in Dutch.” There's just gonna be things like that where people just aren't gonna necessarily know, or maybe not care. Same thing with Netflix.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: That's interesting, yeah.

Mateo Price: Kurzgesagt is a perfect example of faceless channels. There's a world where people discover Kurzgesagt in Thai and just assume they’re a Thai creator.

The Accessibility Play

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: Yeah. And I think it's the aspect of…I shy away from using this word too strongly, but it's more inclusive, right? I think that's what you said about the “second-class user experience.” My mind doesn't go there at first, but obviously we're in an English-speaking country.

Mateo Price: Yeah. When Jimmy and I met with the YouTube exec team, that was what we emphasized the most. Like, this is an accessibility play as much as an increase in viewers, you know, viewership or opportunities for creators—like that thesis. That’s what I wrote in the LinkedIn post, of content as a universal language, which goes both ways because it's a ton of non-English creators who could, you know, get their content now in English and try to make more ad revenue from what they're doing.

But yes, same way in reverse. I think it's really important…like, in the past, YouTube really prioritized subtitling as a form of accessibility, right? Which has been great. And to me this is just another version of an accessibility initiative they really should want to get behind, right?

Especially, think from an educational perspective. You want to make education barrier-less, and there's obviously some trouble where if someone's teaching math and writing in Arabic…probably can't hear a dub of it and get it.

But there's a lot of things that I think can be really improved. Breaking down this barrier so to speak.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: Yeah. I mean, think about, like, “Crash Course.” If I can, you know, translate it into any language.

Mateo Price: To me, that's really cool. I truly believe that is a net positive for the world and I would be very surprised if YouTube keeps doing this, the other social giants don't follow.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: Yeah. It's just a win-win all around. YouTube is doing this for themselves as well. More user-generated content in more languages just means more people in the door anyway. That means more ad revenue.

Mateo Price: Yeah. It's a win-win for everyone. And when you think about TikTok, like, who's the biggest TikToker? It's Khaby. Does not have words. So it's language-less, which is a big reason I would assume why he's huge. Imagine if every creator had the opportunity to be in all of the languages, you know what I mean? At least major Top 20 languages that constitute like 90% of watch time on the platform.

The Future of YouTube (And Google)

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: With their announcement, maybe this was just me not really understanding at first, but I thought they were announcing that they were essentially doing auto-generated dubbing the same way they do auto-generated captions.

So I thought, “Wait, are they just essentially buying what you at CreatorGlobal are already doing?” Like, are they just doing the dubbing themselves? But it took me a bit to realize “Oh, wait, no, you still have to go to a provider.”

Mateo Price: That's now like YouTube's goal. YouTube's goal—and Google’s—is to have the best AI dubbing tech out there so that you can be a creator, click upload video, and they go, “Hey, great.Thanks for uploading it. Do you want us to dub this and X languages?” You go, “Yep these five.”

Then they go, “Cool. We also have a whole search and discovery rec system that's built to help.” Keep all of this in mind, which is a very underappreciated problem: Today on YouTube, the audio tracks aren't recognized by the algorithm. It's literally just these co-watch relationships that we're building.

We added a couple audio tracks that had been missing on a video called World's Largest Bowl of Cereal. But YouTube's algorithm doesn't even recognize the fact that we added an audio track or that it exists. They literally just saw that between this day and this day, a ton of people in those languages were watching it more and so then they just showed it to everyone.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: So YouTube and Google are building towards having the best AI, making it easy for creators. Is that essentially then taking away from CreatorGlobal’s value add?

Or is it similar to captions, right? Like the auto-generated captions are always gonna be very mid, but it gets the job done. But if you want to make super accessible captions, you're probably gonna pay a company that will make it better for the hearing-impaired.

Is that kind of where your guys’ heads are at with CreatorGlobal? Yeah, it's coming with YouTube and Google, that's cool. We'll even help them out with that. But for the people who want the premium experience, they're gonna have to come to us?

Mateo Price: AI and dubbing, there's three areas right now.

1. Translation and transcription, which is pretty close to solved through OpenAI and Whisper. Not quite but it's close.

2. Then you have like lip reanimation and deep-faking a bit, right? Making it seem like you're speaking natively. That is pretty hard to solve, and I think it will come to the creator space. It'll probably take at least 18+ months just because the best players—some of whom we’re speaking to—they're all focused on traditional Hollywood right now because they have millions of dollars to spend on this versus creators don't.

3. The last one which is what Google and other companies are trying to do is text to speech or speech to speech. So text to speech is just like, “Oh, Nate. Give me access to two of your podcasts. Boom. Now type a sentence and it'll sound like you.” That's super cool and already looks really promising. That and speech to speech, which Google's also trying to do which is like, “Now let me take you speaking something. Take someone else saying whatever in a dubbed language and then I will make you sound like you're speaking in Spanish.” Or use these AI-generated voices that you can use to fill in for background characters, right?

It's all coming. CreatorGlobal's perspective is that we're going to leverage the tech where it's helpful. Google is building the long-to-mid-tail solution. We're very much a fat-tail solution if you want to have the highest possible quality dubbing rebuilt entirely from scratch.

It's a complement more than a hindrance. I actually think it’s a good thing if Google gets all creators dubbed, even mid, because then everyone's just thinking about it.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: But to stand out, you'll have to spend more and do more.

Mateo Price: I mean the thing with AI voices, the biggest miss right now that's gonna be super hard to solve is the quality of the voice. A lot of creators like Jimmy that do unscripted content, have background noise, multiple voices talking…all these things that just make it really hard for an AI to pull out and do it correctly.

What Is CreatorGlobal?

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: What differentiates CreatorGlobal then in terms of, who do you view as competitors? Because I'm sure there's plenty of companies you're paying attention to.

Mateo Price: There’s these traditional studios, you know what I mean. There's a couple of creator-focused solutions.

But I think really the way we're looking at it is we're specifically built right now for YouTube and maybe one day other platforms. But for YouTubers, not people making movies and traditional Hollywood talent.

And that again just comes back to like, “Hey, a lot of creators don't have their content ready two-to-four weeks in advance.” And they don't have it two days in advance, at least, that's how we do it. So it's, like, if you can build a solution that's really high quality that can have really fast turnaround time…and for YouTube in particular right? Sourcing of the right music and effects, talent, leveraging technology…

So we want to rebuild all of that. We have to pull out the audio, recreate the music and sound, then overlay that with new audio, which just makes the experience better. It's just higher quality.

Creators Go International

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: Let’s talk about the historical context of how we got here, the converging factors. Whether it's just Wi-Fi accessibility across the globe, YouTube itself becoming more global, AI technology becoming more accessible.

Mateo Price: Yeah, I mean I think the biggest thing is YouTube getting really aggressive and trying to go international, right? So like we've talked about before, they're seeing explosive growth in non primarily-English-speaking areas.

If you look at YouTube's highest user penetration, the top 30 countries are all primarily English-speaking. And it's 90+ percent penetration. So it's like, how much more can you really do? You're just getting the same user to watch more in a day or watch more days a week versus only new people abroad.

A lot of times it's like only 20% of this country uses it or 30% or whatever. And the biggest catalyst has been YouTube is focused on expanding their reach internationally. As a result of that, now there's suddenly…YouTube's majority non-English content.

I just think that the biggest thing—YouTube is focused on going global themselves. It's having a huge impact on the number of creators creating content there and the number of viewers consuming it, which just opens the door now for a more globalized content ecosystem, so to speak.

The other reason, with technology accelerating as quickly as it is, the concept and idea of breaking down language barriers feels extremely accessible in the next three, five years. So I think you have YouTube's already going international. Part of the reason why that can work is because from a Wi-Fi perspective and just like adopting the Internet, that's just becoming way more accessible in different areas of the world.

I'm pretty sure only 15% of India a decade ago had Internet. And now it's like 50%, some big jump where you're like “Oh f*** that's a lot.” YouTube TV, that’s also been huge for them going international, just like meeting people where they're at, people that consume content, Spanish and Portuguese people for example primarily watch on a TV.

To me, that's the perfect catalyst of it being good for YouTube as a company.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: Yeah.

Mateo Price: They've already been focused on being this fully global brand. They talk about being a global company and having no secondhand user experiences and this is pretty much solving for both of those things.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: The overarching story…this is a story more about globalization developments than the tech itself. Because theoretically, they probably could have built the tech for multi-track five years ago, right? It's just more who would have used it and who would have watched it?

Mateo Price: Exactly.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: What I think is so fascinating about this…the best technologies don't emerge from just some super smart engineers sitting down and hacking something. They're actually bringing in factors that build the case for why this is necessary.

Mateo Price: This is perfect timing.

And there are these second order effects on digital advertising that I don't think have shown up yet. It's first that access expands to different platforms. Then we start to occasionally just be in the mindset where advertisements through digital can be effective everywhere and then the companies follow an increase in their digital spend—maybe not in a recession.

There's layers. So I wouldn't be shocked if five years from now, the RPMs in all these other markets double or triple. That's a big if, but, you know, to your point, it's timing.

On MrBeast’s involvement

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: If Jimmy hadn't started down this path…YouTube is already doing this stuff, but he's been an influence, everything he's done with it, right?

Mateo Price: The pilot originally didn't include Jimmy. And wasn't going great. Jimmy literally forced his way into the program. He was like, I believe in this as a concept so much.

And then because he was so bullish on it, and like he's telling other people about it and being the test case, and then obviously, it's been blowing up for us. That's low-key what pushed this whole thing through at YouTube.

It's so funny. It's really because Jimmy two years ago—kudos to this guy—was just like, “No, this is definitely the future and I need to be in this now. I want to help you figure it out.”

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: The last thing I had is more just the human element aspect. Who are the people building CreatorGlobal?

Mateo Price: Jimmy's been thinking about this for like multiple years at this point and then going through this beta and testing it for himself…he had people internally that worked for Beast that he entrusted to help navigate the whole process. Build these systems for success. Execute on them. That is the team that is now morphing into not just doing it for him, but also scaling and doing it for other people.

Our team is a representation of how we're going to help creators. Really global, like every language we're in we have someone that helps us in those languages manage everything. Sometimes we hop on these Zooms where there's a plus-18 hour time difference, just like with everyone who's there.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: Another member of the team is the COO…

Mateo Price: What he's doing now is just focused on building that entire dub process and scaling it the right way. So it's building our own studios and leveraging the right technology and setting up a system so that this can work for more creators than just Beast, all at the same time. You know what I mean?

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: When you say building out studios, like literally physical studios?

Mateo Price: We have our own studio physically in Mexico City.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: Wow.

Mateo Price: Jimmy was like, the current process, when I'm trying to work with a lot of traditional people, isn't perfect. It's not meant for creators. So, I figured out the process and built my own version that's meant for creators.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: You also are just coming out of stealth essentially. Can you speak to how many…this is a team of X and growing?

Mateo Price: It's 20 and growing.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: Not that long ago, it was five. I think for people, it's like, “Oh wait, this is a real company. though. Same way Feastables has its own CEO and its own team.”

Mateo Price: Yeah, and there's a difference, right? Between companies that use Jimmy's name, like Creative Juice, where it's its own entity. Versus CreatorGlobal is its own entity that is a subsidiary…

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: Of the holding company. Yeah.

Mateo Price: This isn't a company that just uses Jimmy's name.

Nathan Graber-Lipperman: And he's really invested in it.

Mateo Price: Yeah, exactly. Like, he's seen what it does for him and he's like, I want everyone to be able to do that.