How Youtube tries to defend itself against Instagram and Tiktok

Youtube has lost importance recently, Tiktok and Instagram are more important for the young target group. To what extent are the new features you are developing with your team in Zurich a response to this?

Geoff van der Meer: I don’t think the starting position has changed much for us. There were always other platforms. Our claim remains unchanged: we want to be the best home for content creators. And if you look at our numbers, we’re on the right track. For example, we have had the short video format “Youtube Shorts” for two years now and we already see 1.5 billion viewers per month. I also think platforms aren’t depriving each other of opportunities, we’re just giving content creators and viewers more options.

But these shorts were exactly a reaction to the reels on Instagram and the videos on Tiktok.

Youtube started early with short videos. For example, the very first video on our platform – «Me at the Zoo» – was quite short, at 19 seconds. The big change was not the short videos themselves, but that it became much easier to produce videos in the first place. All you need is a mobile phone. Since then we have also seen many of our users become content creators.

Research shows that the attention span of young people has decreased. Youtube contributes to this development – what triggers that for you?

I rather think of it as media consumers living in a happy time these days because they have choices. But of course there are also concerns about the duration of use and therefore the health of our users. We’ve put a lot of thought into this and integrated the controls into the app. You can set a limit yourself when using our app. What we see is that users not only watch videos, but also interact with the creators in other ways. And they have different usage routines. Sometimes they go deeper into a topic that interests them, sometimes they flip through the videos to talk. Depending on what you’re in the mood for.

How have YouTube’s figures developed in recent years?

They are crazy. When I joined YouTube six years ago, we celebrated one billion users. Today there are more than two billion active users per month. With the paid subscription, we passed the 80 million music and premium subscriber mark worldwide, which is a milestone. Many of these premium subscribers are big fans of YouTube and want to get the most out of the platform.

Is the growth of recent years related to the pandemic?

There was some influence. But overall, the pandemic hasn’t impacted our business much. We’ve seen more live streaming and people moving from linear TV to YouTube. This trend has remained.

The big problem for many content creators and for musicians is how effectively they can monetize their videos – not just on YouTube. How realistic is it that this will get better?

We make sure everyone is paid fairly. That’s the big advantage of our new Content ID, a copyright protection technology, especially for musicians who aren’t as closely involved with YouTube. With the Content ID, they can ensure that they receive their share of the revenue from their works. YouTube has paid $6 billion to the music industry in the past 12 months alone. For example, for content creators, there’s a new way to pre-license a song with copyright. This way they can ensure that their videos are not blocked or that the revenue from a piece of music playing in the background does not go entirely to the musician or label.

If multiple artists are involved in a video, the money will be shared fairly from the start in the future. Until now, the label, the musician or the creator received all the revenue. Now we’re going to make it possible for everyone, meaning songwriters, labels and artists, to get their share.

When does this option exist?

We are in the process of implementing this feature, we are now testing it with a few thousand creators.

The content on Youtube, Instagram and Tiktok is often exactly the same, the platforms are interchangeable, how do you ensure success there?

We’re trying to offer even more options, in short, we want creators to grow with YouTube. So we invest a lot of time in exchanging ideas with them and developing new features that serve them. If we’re attractive to creators, that’s reflected in a growing audience.

Social media channels are also used for propaganda and disinformation – keyword Ukraine war. How do you make sure the messages are not fake?

When content is loaded on YouTube, we have clear, non-negotiable guidelines. We review all content regardless of where it comes from. The rules are also specifically about disinformation.

How about millions of new posts per day – 720,000 hours of video! – possible?

We invest significant amounts of money and time in machine learning solutions that flag and take action on videos that violate our Community Guidelines. These are continuously developed and adapted where necessary. In addition to our automated systems, thousands of people work 24/7 to review videos. This system is usually very precise, 5.2 of the 5.6 million videos deleted between July and September 2022 have been flagged by our systems. We regularly publish our Transparency Report, which shows how many videos were removed and how quickly.

How have the advertising figures developed in recent years?

As viewers move from traditional media such as TV channels to YouTube, interest in advertising with us is also growing. We partner with Nielson, a global viewer measurement company, to sell ads so that our advertisers have independent metrics to help them make decisions.

For example, can you say how many ads are in an 8 minute video?

This is dynamic depending on the audience of the video. Then the advertising in Spain, for example, is also different than in the US. It also depends on what we know demographically about the user, what we know about the content, how it fits with the potential promotional trailers. The decisions are made while the video is already running on Youtube. We try to bring together ads, content and viewers that fit together. We send the information back to the advertisers using the Google Advertising Tools and to the creators. So that both know which viewers they are reaching and how well a specific video is profitable.

Aditotoro, a successful YouTube content creator from Switzerland, says he prefers not to look at the numbers. As an artist, how can you balance between your art and trying to do only what the public wants?

Artists have always struggled with this. There are creators who don’t look at the numbers at all, and others who look at it in extreme detail and want to know when viewers drop off to optimize their posts there. It also depends on how you want to interact with the audience. But it continues to walk a tightrope.

What content creators don’t like are algorithm changes that quickly turn their world and business model upside down. Every update brings problems – how do you deal with them?

The best approach for creators is to produce the content viewers want to see. And we also pursue this goal. We’ve invested heavily in artificial intelligence to recommend what users want to see. It’s also about mood. It gets complicated when we want to show content that makes our viewers happy. That’s why we also ask questions after the videos: Was that to your liking? Was it useful? We want to know if we gave users a good experience. (cpf)