Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The CEO Quit… Now What?”.
In her retirement message to YouTubers, which is confusing because YouTubers are people who make videos on YouTube, not people who work for YouTube um. She states that her reason is to focus more on her family, health and personal projects. She will apparently continue to work with YouTube in some capacity through the transition, as well as she will continue to advise. Google, CEO, Sundar pichai in the long term. Her successor is her longtime second in command, Neil Mohan, who I have met, I have never actually met Susan. I was joking about being on a first name basis with her, but I have met Neil, whose background in advertising and close working relationship with Susan since 2015 likely indicates a decision on the part of YouTube to continue her policies and management style in her role. As CEO Susan is primarily known for making YouTube more accessible to advertisers and trying to manage both outside demands for moderation of potentially offensive content and increased regulation, so our discussion questions are but I’d say pretty bite-sized yeah.
You know pretty simple yeah, given everything. That’S happened with YouTube in the last decade. Was her tenure a success? I think it would be really difficult to argue that it wasn’t um YouTube is the most successful social media platform. As far as my okay opinion on it would go so it’s complicated Tick Tock. I think is actually outpacing YouTube for watch time, but as far as I can tell we’re counting on bite dances numbers in order to determine that yeah uh – I don’t know about you guys, but I believe a word bite dance says: um, I’m not going to take Anything they say at face value, whereas Google is a very analytics driven company. Have they ever bent the truth, uh-huh uh, but do they just BS around when it comes to analytics data? Well, they’ve certainly never been caught.
The way that Facebook was on video, oh yeah, that was rough, so they’ve still pretty much got my trust. As far as that goes you scrolled past a video and played 0.5 seconds of it sounds like a view to me yeah exactly yeah. It depends on how you determine success. One of the ways that I would is look at like us right look at people that have been able to make long-standing careers or long-standing companies based around now.
That’S a stronger argument because you know yeah. I don’t think that something as simple as watch time is, you know, like oh equals success. It’S definitely a valuable metric, but one of the things that – and I’ve talked about this even in the last couple of weeks, one of the things that YouTube has done well is built a thriving yes ecosystem for their for their Downstream Partners. When other platforms die, the creators on those platforms come to YouTube when other platforms have a creator that get really big one of the ways that those creators start to monetize themselves more effectively to the next level. Is they come to YouTube so yeah? I would say that you know if we, if we, if we look at at her tenure, which is man that goes back to, was she at YouTube when they launched, like Creator, rewards and like play buttons and all that pretty sure she’s been around in some capacity. Like the actual whole time, but I don’t know if she was the CEO back, then I’m not certain yeah, I think she’s been around because it was like started in her parents garage, but not technically with her.
So I remember yeah, so she rented her parents garage to uh, Sergey Brin and Larry Page yeah, just so she’s like been around yeah, but she I don’t think that she worked at YouTube. I don’t think so before Google acquired YouTube, so she’s she’s been oh okay. I completed those stories a little bit: yeah yeah, so YouTube was independent for a short period of time before it was acquired by Google, because there was no way I thought gon na survive. The story mix-up that I had was.
I thought the garage was for YouTube. No, no, no Google got it um I mean yeah. I think that without getting too deep into some of the things that have gone wrong, YouTube has overall been a success. Oh there’s been missteps.
I guarantee you under anyone. There would have been some amount of missteps. There’S been missteps that have been incredibly frustrating like the the dislike button was really frustrating yeah um how certain things have been handled at different times when really frustrating, but the bottom line is it’s successful? It’S successful. I mean the dislike button is just part of a of a larger move towards obfuscation of analytics from the users of the platform, which is like not good, and that’s something that honestly, I just don’t even know. If I would blame Susan for directly, I think that’s just something that is happening more broadly at Google uh. I I hate it.
You know I I it used to be that you went on to a channel page and you could actually you know DM another follower of the channel, okay from a privacy standpoint or like a Spam standpoint of an issue. You know. Obviously, there are problems with this, but like um, you know, I don’t see any reason why we had to. For example, um, you know cut off social blades access to the API if they store data past two years, like being able to see the entire history of a Channel’s growth and fall, or whatever else is really useful for the Creator Community yeah.
And why? What why like, if I had had the foresight to just track it myself, I I could have this – was just a convenient way of getting access to it, but you’re just basically saying no convenience um. Ah, no, no trust us! The removal of dislikes is not to avoid corporate Channel problems. It’S it’s much Dumber that would if they had come out and basically said our advertising Partners, don’t like dislikes on their videos. I’D have been like.
I get it like that sucks, but I get it, but no it’s it. It actually is what they said. It’S actually that dumb yeah sorry um all right. What would you have done differently, though, is? Is our next question? What would you do differently or what would you like to see change moving forward? I I think more transparency would be a good thing.
Maybe it’s not good from like a like a like a shareholder relation standpoint or whatever, like you know how YouTube announced that they were no longer going to be uh, announcing um growth in like users like monthly users, or anything like that, just because it wasn’t impressive. But even if it’s not impressive for your for your stockholders doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not useful, for you know us to know like hey um. Am I growing or is just the platform growing overall or you know, what’s going on more transparency, I think is never a bad thing. That’S something that I would have liked to see. I I think that more transparency could also help with a lot of the complaints that certain groups have about the platform like, for example, I know that we’ve gotten mess messages from some prominent Firearms creators over the last little while asking if float plane would be a Safe haven for their content and right now I think the biggest problem they have and I apologize if I’m putting words in your mouth, that you don’t agree with, but I think the biggest problem that they have is communication. Yeah, you don’t even know new rules. Just come out of nowhere and they’re not really sure what they have to do about. It came in retroactively, applied to older content, which doesn’t really old content, sometimes which doesn’t make any sense to me, and it’s not they don’t.
There’S there’s usually not any active communication before the rules show up so that they can understand them before they’re there, and so that YouTube can understand what they’re doing uh, because a fairly recent thing that happened to them was like really weird YouTube stepped back. A lot of those rules, but a bunch of these channels literally thought they were all just going to be deleted like the whole Channel. They thought they’re, just gon na be permanently banned and then YouTube pulled back the rules, but if they didn’t all these channels would just be gone and when that’s your entire livelihood that can be well, it’s terrifying yeah. I mean that’s the only word for it and like when you have when it’s just you it’s terrifying and it’s not like when it’s you and a company and you have all these employees and stuff like your thing, being deleted off of YouTube.
Isn’T just shutting you down, it’s potentially shutting down the professional lives of an entire massive group of people well yeah, and the thing is like just because your channel isn’t shut down today, just because it worked out this time doesn’t mean that you’re not still living in Abject Terror yeah right that it could just happen tomorrow, so you know, I think I think an increase in transparency around policy is is absolutely something that they could do better um. I had one that kind of popped into my head that I really wanted to talk about, but now I’ve now I’ve forgotten yeah. Apparently one of the things is, you can’t show how to attach a suppressor to a firearm. It’S a funny thing like that.
Almost feels like it comes from like a like a movie Watcher’s understanding of suppressors, they’re, not quiet yeah, like uh, you can like I, I okay, so a they’re not illegal in a lot of places. Yeah um B, it’s not like it’s not like suppressors or for like becoming like a ninja like like silent Deadly Assassin. Like pull your ears out like that yeah they’re, they’re freaking loud still, it’s a gun. You can. You can get them to be pretty quiet.
If you, if you also use like subsonic ammunition and like all this other kind of stuff but like it’s, not most of them are still you’re gon na know. What’S going on uh, so yeah, I don’t know like one of the one of the one of the things that happened recently. I don’t know if we’re gon na talk about this for way too long, but one of the things that happened recently was, I hope I don’t misquote this.
I might. I believe it was a magazine of a capacity of 30 or more. You were not allowed to show it being inserted to a firearm on camera because it was seen as weapon modification but for a very large amount of weapons.
That is a standard magazine right, like or Firearms sure like a chain gun. So what you’d have to have a really short chain? An M4? No, no! Okay! No! No! I know what you mean, I just mean, like I mean it’s not like, there aren’t YouTube videos of people like oh yeah, no for sure, so so what what you’re? Just supposed to like yeah, this is the chain people were and like it was unclear because it didn’t. If I remember correctly, it didn’t say anything about firing, a firearm that had a 30 round magazine in it.
It just said you couldn’t insert it. So people were like blur, they would, they would show them. The magazine come in close to the firearm and then right before the insertion. It would just blur that area and then it would click in and then they would just use it normally and they were like this might actually be. Okay, we don’t know, that’s funny, I don’t know um but like yeah, it’s been, it’s been weird but anyways back to CEO. You know, I.
I think that I think the okay. So let me make a counter argument to my own point now when it comes to things like um, you know obvious conspiracy theories, whether we’re talking about like moon, landing, conspiracy theories or flat earth right, like one of the things that YouTube has done in recent times, Is they have suppressed the little thing yeah? So okay they’ve done that too, but one of the things they did before that was they suppressed information from non-credible sources um and on the one hand, while I think that we should see perfect transparency in a perfect world. We would have perfect transparency about what exactly it is that they are doing algorithmically with respect to suppressing you know: non-trustworthy sources of information like people who propagate yeah, Flat Earth, conspiracy theories or whatever the case may be, but the problem with that is that if they Say: hey: here’s! What we’re blocking and or demoting, and here’s how we’re doing it.
They pretty much open up the floodgates for abusers to come in and go. How can I just barely work around this enough that my content still gets out there and it could be very damaging? It could be very harmful at scale. Absolutely every single rule or system will be abused.
Every single one like it’s, not it’s not a potential. It’S a guarantee, so you have to be a little bit careful about about your transparency there, which sucks yeah it’s stupid for everyone that like wants to do things properly. .