Google spoke on a range of issues related to Youtube

Some interesting extracts from his conversation with Samir Saran of ORF.

When I first started, YouTube in India was growing, but we really had just a handful of creators that were known nationwide with big followings. That number is now in the hundreds of thousands of creators. They are not just building wide audiences on YouTube but are building businesses. We commissioned a study a couple of years ago. The study showed that the creator economy in India on YouTube was generating almost Rs 6800 crores and 700,000 job opportunities.

We’re doing a refresh on it. The new stats will come out in December.

So the impact that it’s having on an aggregate basisis profound and penetrating the broader economy as well. For example, we had the swearing in ceremony of India’s new President, live streamed on YouTube that got millions and millions of views. Thousands of creators make a living on YouTube.

For example, Rachna Ranade a former accountant is now a teacher. She teaches millions of Indians, particularly young women, how to manage their finances, how to think about the economy, how to be successful in it. I came across a creator called Kaizan English, she teaches English to native Tamil speakers. We are creating a place for diversity, vibrant economic growth, and also learning.

Further, the demography of this cluster that’s emerging and the gender balance is seeing a new shift.The entire YouTube organization is very focused on this. Youtube is an open platform. Anyone can start a channel on youtube today. It is a place that doesn’t have gatekeepers. It doesn’t have curators, it doesn’t have somebody saying, “You don’t look a certain way or speak incorrectly” etc.

That inherent openness of the platform creates opportunities for incredible diversity. We haveall major Indian languages represented on our platform in terms of creator success. We have, lots of female creators. I don’t have the specific breakout but just even those two examples I gave you both those creators have millions of followers on our platform.

We are a platform that has incredible relevancy in the Creator economy. That is a vibrant economy. It impacts tens of millions of people in India. So it is natural for governments not only in India but all over the world, to care deeply about what happens on these platforms.

Our focus is on making the place safe for creators while sharing their perspectives. A lot of the interactivity on YouTube occurs in the “comments below” the videos that you might watch.

We have tools that allow creators to moderate those comments to make sure that comments that might be hate filled or harassing in nature don’t show up in the feed. We have moderation tools that ensure the creators don’t have to see them as well. Creators feel safer.

YouTube is a place where creators come first. I think it is important for governments to play a role in determining how technology impacts their citizens and make sure that it is a place that works for their citizens.

We see those conversations happening all over the world. In Europe, there’s the Digital Services Act. All over the world there are some common themes in this. One of them is the recognition that this open platform –for free expression, to share your ideas, creativity, opinion – is important.

Diversity wouldn’t happen without an open platform. I do see recognition of that. But then also, I feel that there is a real opportunity for partnership between platforms like YouTube and governments, key stakeholders, policy makers, to make sure that YouTube isn’t a place for mis-information, hate speech, etc.

And to be honest those would be my number one priorities, regardless of whether there’s regulation or not. We have a comprehensive approach for living up to our responsibilities as a global platform.

We’ve 2 billion users who come to our platform every single month. Protecting those users is a toppriority regardless of whether there’s a conversation with regulators or not.

2024 is going to be a crucial layer. The US, India and even the EU parliament will have elections. The overall atmosphere may become polarized and sensitive.

YouTube is a place where that discourse is already happening.

It happens around election cycles – people share their perspective, differing opinions – billions of times on YouTube. There was an election in Brazil recently. This is happening all over the world — multiple elections happening every year. We learn from all of them. We will put all of that learning to, to use when it comes to 2024. Whether it’s the US election, the Indian election, or other elections that are happening all over the world, our approach is comprehensive.

When you upload a video piece of content to YouTube, our recommendation algorithms kick in. And we’ll find over time, the people that are interested in that type of content wherever they live, anywhere in the world.

The first prong of our approach is making sure that we have clear policies around election integrity, or potential misinformation related to elections. How to vote, where to vote, candidate viability, all of those types of things which come into play during elections. We have policies where we remove certain type of content as quickly as possible. We have policies around violence, incitement to violence, hate speech, etc.

Our aim is to contribute to making sure that elections happen in a peaceful manner. But we don’t just stop there with our policies. As you know, a lot of what happens on platforms like YouTube is about the type of content that is recommended.

We have a number of products and you’ll see them in the context of the Indian elections, where we serve up information panels. So when users come to YouTube, they get accurate information from election authorities about voting.

In the US, we ran those panels when the results were certified by the states, so that we serve up authoritative content users are looking for. We actively make sure that we are not promoting misinformation on our platform.

YouTube is a means for connecting. Anybody with an idea or a thought and opinion, can share it with the world wherever their audience might be. When you upload a video piece of content to YouTube, our recommendation algorithms kick in. And we’ll find over time, the people that are interested in that type of content wherever they live, anywhere in the world.

That is a really powerful tool for voices that might be minority that otherwise would not get a means to get amplified on traditional media outlets making it very hard for those voices to get discovered.

I was speaking to someone in Canada about a creator who does a lot of creative things with Bollywood music. They were in Canada, but they found an audience in India and other parts of the world interested in Bollywood content. They built up that audience. And then they became famous in Canada, the country that they live in, and sort of that virtuous cycle happens every single day. YouTube kind is a machine that enables those otherwise small or overlooked or diverse voices, to really find their community and find a way to prosper on the platform.

We have a set of community guidelines that are global in nature. The role of YouTube in the changing education scenario.

In terms of learning and education on YouTube, a lot of my internal product review conversations with my team revolves around it. I personally don’t think that YouTube is going to be a platform that certifies learners. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t partner with organizations that actually provide certifications. It could be traditional education organizations, it could be digital learning organizations. YouTube’s role is the dissemination of that knowledge, a place where creators should be able to come and produce the content. Be it Physics or Algebra or how do you learn a particular vocational skill. Or how to cook a particular recipe. All of those are learning opportunities.

The types of tools and features and products that you should expect on YouTube are the things that allow educators — we call them edu-tubers – to do that at scale.

One of the products we’re working on is to be able to actually stitch together a collection of videos into a course. And have checkpoints in that course so that somebody who’s learning, say Algebra can move from one step to the other and progress on that journey in a systematic step wise manner. We’re also thinking about ways that creators can generate economic value by putting their courses out there and earn a living. We may have ways for those creators to work with third party organizations for things like certification. That’s sort of how we think about the product vision.

If you’re an advertiser, you use the Google Ad tools to actually measure not just reach and frequency, but the impact of your ads from, the effect of those ads; did they drive conversions? Did they drive the install of an app etc.

YouTube is a place where hundreds of millions of hours of learning happening on a regular basis. There are lots and lots of creators that are in this edu-tuber category. Learning is probably one of our most salient use cases throughout the world.

A couple of weeks ago we started rolling out something called YouTube handles where you can actually have a specific unique identifier on YouTube, which is just yours. It is a way to create a unique identity. Not just for creators but for anyone who logs in. This unique person.

Youtube is very popular in a country like Bhutan. Some individual creators have more subscribers than even the national television channel. But Bhutan is not on the YouTube partnership program right now. As we want to ensure this platforms is global in nature and enables economic activity, just like in India, I want to make sure that countries like Bhutan also have those economic opportunities for creators.

I can’t give a specific time on when we’ll bring the YouTube Partner Program to Bhutan, but it is certainly our aspiration to be as global as possible with that program.

One of the things I haven’t talked a lot about is how YouTube is a place where businesses, small businesses in particular, but all kinds of businesses are also thriving. And that’s fundamentally because YouTube is an advertiser driven media model. The revenue that is generated on our platform comes generally from advertisers who are looking to reach audiences. We work incredibly hard to build products that cater to the needs of advertisers all over the world.

My goal is to continue to grow the advertiser ecosystem, not only is that good for small businesses and advertisers, but also good for creators as it generates more revenue for them. We share our revenue from all the advertising we generate with our Creator partners. And so that’s how that ecosystem continues to grow.

One thing that I will say about businesses on our platform, is that businesses can be creators too. That is a paradigm shift in terms of how brands and businesses have thought about their business. I urge every business to have a presence on YouTube, set up a channel, build a channel.

Regardless of whether you’re spending advertising dollars or not, you will attract an audience over time and that channel itself becomes a means by which you can build your overall business. You can communicate with your customers. You can drive your customers to your physical presence. You can amplify that voice through advertising.

All brands and advertisers and businesses should think like creators because this creator economy really is, is the future, especially with young people.

How do we measure business impact? First and foremost, whether you’re a brand or an advertiser or a business, or even a creator, is really about viewership and engagement. That is really the way that you can judge whether your message is having an impact. As simple as the views on a video. But also about how users are actually engaging with your video content.

The Studio tool that you use to upload your videos, get all the stats on your videos. That is a tool that’s available to creators to advertisers.

Additionally, obviously, if you’re an advertiser, you use the Google Ad tools to actually measure not just reach and frequency, but reach and impact of your ads; the effect for example whether did they drive conversions? Did they drive and install of an app etc.

Advertisers are not going to want to be on YouTube, if the content is objectionable in many ways. And so we have a moral obligation, but also a business obligation to do the right thing for our users and creators.

When I’m talking to stakeholders, or YouTube creators, and businesses, wherever they are in the world, the conversation really is about what can YouTube do to play its role in the local economy.

So the success of creators, the success of small businesses, is really the fundamental way that YouTube contributes.We obviously also do things above and beyond that, by, sponsoring entrepreneurship. It really is about making sure that creators and businesses can thrive on a platform like ours. That’s obviously a direct way that we can contribute. Creators employ people, they give jobs to other people, they educate millions of people. And so the impact is real.It’s all happening through our platform.

To make sure that it is not a place for organized crime, we have a comprehensive approach. We have policies, we use a combination of pretty sophisticated machine learning technology and artificial intelligence that continues to get better. And we have 1000s of highly trained individuals all over the world, on the ground in places like India that are enforcing our policies against criminal organizations, against terrorist organizations.Content from such organizations is not allowed on our platform.

We’re not perfect but we endeavor to remove this type of content as quickly as possible.We are always investing more in our technology to catch this even more accurately and fast. We do things like being able to detect firearms but itis not as simple as just being able to detect a gun in a video. A gun might be a legitimate use case be it for hunting or a law enforcement officer, or a military officer. So we need to be able to use a combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence and use highly trained individuals to make a decision as rapidly as possible about the context. This is a difficult challenge, but we take it on a daily basis.

In the last quarter, we removed nearly four and a half million videos from YouTube. And keep in mind, this is from a corpus of billions and billions of videos. Something on the order of over 70% were removed with 10 views or less.

So there is very minimal impact of violative content on our viewers.

We launched a new product on YouTube called YouTube shorts. And it is about short form content. Vertically oriented content, obviously, lots of platforms do that. But that is one of the fastest growing types of content on YouTube. I consume a lot of this. My favorites being sports. I watch everything from basketball, to cricket to football — both American football and what the rest of the world calls football. But shorts is super fun and interesting. I see every week some new remixes of Bollywood songs. 

By Neal Mohan

Chief Product Officer. Youtube

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