A personal update from Susan | Hacker News Reader

A personal update from Susan

blog.youtube

64 pointsrobbiet48049 comments

25 years at Google, 9 as CEO of YouTube, created AdSense and was a driver of the DoubleClick acquisition. Just a hell of a career. Maybe the single person who did the most for Google in that time frame?

Editing to add that her garage was Google's first office

YouTube, AdSense, and DoubleClick? Wow. All those are Google's money-making products. Both YouTube and AdSense helped countless content creators across the globe. Not everyone goes to CS school or other graduate programmes for various reasons. These content creators make a good living too, I guess (at least top 5-10% content creators makes good living, but I don't any data to backup). So in a way, if you make money from YouTube or AdSense, then Susan played a big role for sure. Also, regardless of what HN think of Google Ads and Google's privacy policies, it fundamentally helped some those content creators, including support and development for other free Google products such as Gmail, Maps, Search and others stuff etc.

Indeed! But I'm still pondering why she didn't put this announcement on her YouTube channel. It could be:

A. the message was more effectively conveyed as text

B. all the comment spam in her January 2022 video (people asking for a new CEO, etc.)

C. possibility of inopportune ad placement as she is introducing Neal Mohan

D. the people who produced her previous videos are gone after the layoffs

I'm not sure but the SEC has strange rules about where you can announce material information about the business. YouTube may not be one of those places.

her parents' garage, which might be how her sister got to know then later married Sergey?

I hope whoever takes over implements one simple change to the YouTube algorithm:

If a user subscribes to a channel, show the user videos from that channel on their front page.

no way, some guy probably did an A/B and showing random crap instead "increases engagement"

I don't think they measured it on a period of more than a couple of hours

I suggested them to put:

- A random video from the ones uploaded in the last minute.

- Another random video, uploaded anytime

In both cases, these videos should be shown regardless of language, view count, etc.

In most cases these random videos will be junk, but I bet there will be gems which would die unwatched otherwise.

Isn't that what the "subscriptions" is? It depends on the algorithm,

Besides I generally do get new videos from subscriptions on my front page. And in my "suggestions" for unrelated videos, and in my search for unrelated content, and sometimes even in category tabs for content it is not a category for. I get it, I'll watch it later, I know where to watch it.

YouTube has gotten consistently worse under her leadership in my experience. Creators have been squeezed dry with less and less revenue, ads are obnoxious and terrible, and experiments like shorts are badly implemented, make little money for creators and should be aborted.

YouTube 10 years ago was a place for people to do what they loved and build a following, now it's just a click bait farm where everyone is gaming the algorithm with the same thumbnails, the same content, and even hawk their own ads/partnerships because YouTube revenue can't support them anymore.

Good riddance IMHO. I hope whoever comes next actually focuses on creators and their needs.

She's being replaced by a person from the Doubleclick acquisition. What does that signal to you will happen to the already embattled creator space?

It sucks. Every single creator I've followed has had some variation of, "well shit, YouTube isn't making me enough to sustain this anymore" video in the last few months. Things are going to really dry up and go down hill fast as more creators are forced to give up.

YouTube rewards creators more than any other platform. However they're ruthless about the subscriber demographics. A few thousand subscribers is enough to become Ramen profitable [1] if they are high income people from high income countries.

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html

Uhhh no, you need well over 100k subscribers and videos getting consistently thousands of views to make 'Ramen profitable' money. And even that is tenuous as inflation just keeps jacking up the cost of ramen for everyone.

Who comes next is the current CPO, so I wouldn't expect anything different

I have no justification for saying this other than personal work experience, but I'm fairly certain none of that has anything to do with Susan. In fact with her gone I expect it to only get worse, but don't take my word for it.

What? Being the CEO of the product means she isn't responsible for a decade of it's performance? This makes no sense.

A CEO does not implement or even necessarily strategize. They... execute. Their job is to make the right decisions at the right time. The decisions available come from a team which a good CEO should trust and not have to micromanage.

I would not expect her to choose the performance indicators. I would expect her to choose another plan if expectations are not being met, but not necessarily come up with those plans.

It's a business, so the goal is making money. YouTube certainly made money when she was calling the shots. We'll see what happens.

But despite all this I consistently hear from creators that YouTube is the best place to make money with content. Note, IG is the best place to simply do product placement -- like wearing and advertising a brand. But if you're doing video content YouTube is still the best place to do it, compared to IG Reels, TikTok, Vimeo, Facebook Watch, etc...

Similar to response about someone ranting against Teams -- I just don't see the huge issue with YouTube. It seems to work solidly and there are definitely people who make good money from it. Of course there is a long tail. Which is to be expected when my 9 year old nephew and half of his friends have YouTube channels. I just don't think people really have thought through at YouTube level scale what it would mean to "make things better for creators".

Why would YouTube ever “focus on creators and their needs”? YouTube is an ads business run on top of user-generated content. YouTube’s customers are advertisers. Susan greatly “improved product-market fit” during her tenure, by forcing many changes upon creators which made advertisers happier and more willing to run ads on the platform.

YouTube only cares about creators insofar as advertisers care about the eyeballs being there to watch their ads (which, yes, they do); and the people with those eyeballs have a preference for high-quality content (which, uh… undetermined); and there is a seller’s market for content (which, no, there isn’t; the long tail of eyeball-attracting content on YouTube is created completely without compensation.)

> Creators have been squeezed dry with less and less revenue

Actually, I think Youtube is highly underrated in this regard. The reason so many creators complain about Youtube is because they're the only social media platform that pays people any substantial sum of money in the first place. For other platforms like Twitch, the money they pay you is mostly comes from the viewer. This is why MKBHD called Youtube the only S-tier social media platform.

MKBHD is in the top 1% of the top 1% of YouTubers, of course they will consider it a S tier platform.

The more interesting thing would be if they were to start all over from scratch, could they do it again with YouTube as it is today? I suspect even getting to 100k subs would just be a total roll of dice and luck now.

A bit inflammatory imo, given the scale of the challenge[^1], but definitely there were several failures under her tenure that are worth noting. Youtube Red (later Premium), Music, and Originals all seemed to not really pan out, and as a result YT seems desperate w.r.t. existing revenue streams. Copyright is also pretty bad, probably bending over backwards for advertisers which also seems to stem from that same desperation. In fact so much of the burden for following regulations, laws, and policies falls to the content creators (stuff like making minor-appropriate content) that yt's monopoly power over the video creator space really is evidenced. Even then, communication is so poor even by google's standards that one wonders yt employees even use the platform - if they even exist at all.

On the other hand, yt streaming and shorts seem to be slowly improving, in the same way google as a whole only seems to innovate insofar as they match exactly what their competitors have already produced. And problems aside, yt is still seems to be growing in popularity and relevance, even with TikTok's competition. If yt can figure out how to actually obtain revenue w/o turning to shadier and shadier advertisers, they might not have to push creators just shy of abandoning the platform, but it's not like creators have anywhere else to go.

[^1]: Revenues for yt continue to miss expectations, payouts for creators and ad spam are obviously low hanging targets. Doesn't make it right, but running a video service isn't cheap.

Why do you think Premium is a failure?

I am a creator with a subscriber base of 2+ million, and a subscriber to Premium. Trivia: on a per-view basis, I make more from Premium views than ad-watching views.

Eh, I'm not an analyst, but to the best of my knowledge yt premium falls under google services, which operates at a net negative. TBF it's mixed in w/ other revenue streams w/ most likely higher cost of revenues, but it's possible that the cost of original programming and exclusivity deals are also higher than income. There's also the issue that even with the mediocre original programming and rather lacking exclusive streaming deals, there's nothing to help it compete against free adblock.

FWIW it's a step in the right direction, and I'm glad creators earn directly from premium views, but i don't think anyone is saying that yt is going to win the streaming war for commercial content, but if it can tie premium into its creator streaming content like twitch does for subs (maybe like yt premium gives a free sub like amazon prime) then the system seems more well-positioned.

Is Neal Mohan the person who was paid like 100 m $ a decade back to prevent him from leaving Youtube ?

According to TechCrunch, yes

https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/06/google-said-to-have-high-l...

> Google offered Pichai $50 million and Mohan $100 million, respectively, to stay

Huh, they thought he was twice as valuable as Pichai at the time.

They probably told Pichai that he can have the 50M now and will put him on the track to be CEO.

.youtube is a tld??

Right? Just shows you the powers of big monopolys.

They're called Brand TLD's https://icannwiki.org/Brand_TLD

lol, i guess youtube gets more clicks than most TLDs so makes sense.

YouTube is not under that TLD, though.

Whats a TLD?

Top Level Domain (like .com, .uk etc)

It's called a Brand TLD. https://icannwiki.org/Brand_TLD

brand TLDs only cost ~$200k. maybe doesn't make sense for the average person, but if you've got google money there's no reason no to pick it up.

And .yt is a ccTLD :)

YouTube has been making many positive moves lately. Very interested to see if this continues after the transition.

Please list these "many positives moves" made by YouTube, as just a content consumer of the platform I haven't heard anything positive about YouTube in a long time.

Whatever team improves livestreaming has been really responsive to creator requests. I believe that if YouTube executes, they'll kill Twitch entirely. Question is if they manage to execute, I'm not confident that it will continue to happen.

They're starting to find the balance between their promotion of smaller creators vs things like disinfo. They're in my opinion more open about how The Algorithm(tm) works vs other social platforms. They've been de-emphasizing gameable metrics as opposed to "do people actually watch the video" metrics.

Shorts is... fine, but they're far more fair to creators than TikTok is. TikTok Creator Fund has poor creator incentives, YouTube Shorts monetization is actually aligning the interests of YouTube as well as creators. (I do have some minor quibbles with some messaging there but what matters is the shape of the agreements.)

They've also recently resolved the whole "should I make a new channel for shorts or post them to my current channel" problem, which is nice.

I dunno that's off the top of my head.

If by “positive moves” you mean infestation of short shallow content to drive addiction, then I disagree.

I hope they stop trying to push shorts into me feed, I'm that guy who hate shorts/tiktok videos with everything I have, at least give me an option to not see any shorts.

I too hate them and don't want anything optimized for minute long content.

This is a kind of fun game of whack-a-mole, but here is my current ruleset for uBlock Origin:

    www.youtube.com###guide-content #endpoint[title="Shorts"]:upward(ytd-guide-entry-renderer)
    www.youtube.com###items #endpoint[title="Shorts"]:upward(ytd-mini-guide-entry-renderer)
    www.youtube.com##ytd-browse ytd-grid-video-renderer:has(span.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[aria-label="Shorts"])
    www.youtube.com##ytd-browse ytd-rich-item-renderer:has(span.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[aria-label="Shorts"])
    www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-video-renderer:has(span.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[aria-label="Shorts"])
    www.youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer ytd-compact-video-renderer:has(span.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[aria-label="Shorts"])

"I always dreamed of working for a company with a mission that could change the world for the better."

May her dream come true one day!

The "Update": because for some reason corporate comms cannot let on that it's a layoff/resignation/shutdown in the post title

Good riddance.

Sirs…

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