YouTube has already conquered the living room—according to a Nielsen report in 2025, it represented 12.5% of TV viewing in U.S. households. Where it’s still a rising competitor is in short-form video, where YouTube Shorts has amassed 200 billion average daily views but not quite the ubiquity of TikTok or Instagram Reels, at least in the U.S.
The exec leading the push to translate the success of YouTube to YouTube Shorts is Aparna Pappu, an almost two-decade Google vet who was previously the GM of Google Workspace, or its productivity suite of Gmail, Google Docs, and more products. In early 2025, she took on a new position as a VP in a product role at YouTube, leading what the company internally calls creator community in Shorts.
Unlike short-form video competitors, Pappu’s view of Shorts focuses on the product in the context of all of YouTube. Key to its growth have been decisions like tapping Google DeepMind modeling experts to improve the platform’s understanding of posted videos and improve recommendation algorithms. “It’s actually a very hard technical problem to solve at global scale for every single person on this planet to find them exactly what they want to see and show it to them exactly when they want to see it,” she explains. For longform YouTube creators, the Shorts team has introduced tools like automatic thumbnail generation. That helps a generation of creators who earn their livings on the platform package their content for new audiences.
