- Hello Insiders.
Got a very special interview for you today.
I thought it would be cool, on this channel,
if we could bring some more of the executives at YouTube
into the Insider Nation.
So, I started with my own boss,
who is the Vice President
of Creator Product Management at YouTube.
He wasn't sure that this was a good idea.
He's not sort of like a big on-screen personality
but he has a lot of really interesting thoughts.
He obviously is very influential at YouTube
and he'd also be happy to come back in the future
and talk about specific topics in more depth
if you guys are interested.
So, check it out, see what you think and in the meantime,
keep it real.
Hello, Insiders.
I have a very special guest with me today.
I have none other than number one, my manager.
You're also the Vice President
of Creator for all of YouTube.
And then thirdly, thirdly, you are the founder
and the godfather of the Creator Insider channel at all.
- Yes - The initial experiments.
- That is true.
- So, we're definitely gonna have to talk about
the origin story for Creator Insider.
(Tom and Ariel laugh)
But before we get there, who is Ariel?
This all-powerful Vice President?
- Oh, my God.
Let's set expectations a little lower.
I'm a guy who works in the engine room of YouTube,
shoveling the coal into the ovens
and making sure that creators
can deal with our platform in the best way possible.
I've been at Google about 15 years now.
I worked in ads for about eight years.
(door bell chiming) There's my door bell going.
Payments for three years, and I've been at YouTube
a little over four years now.
And joined to lead what we call the creator team
within the tech organization.
- So what was that like, making the move to YouTube?
Because before that you were running all of Google Payments.
That's like a pretty big area.
- Let's see, in payments, we had two big parts.
We collected and disbursed
the majority of Google's revenue,
kind of all the billing and accounting, and all that.
And then we also had Android Pay at the time
become Google Pay.
It was a very different kind of environment.
It's an environment that's highly regulated, et cetera.
YouTube is very different, obviously,
and being a platform that's also central to
the zeitgeist of the world is a different set of challenges.
- Lemme ask you this,
some people out there are not really familiar
with all that YouTube does with creators,
can you share a little bit about how your team is structured
and the specific areas that you look at.
- We have a bunch of official teams that report to me
and then I also have what I call second hat
where I spend informal time with creators, et cetera.
We can talk about both of them.
The official role we have,
the first team would be the tools team that you know well
cause you lead that team.
What creators would see there is the new studio, analytics,
spending a lot of time trying to figure out
how we can answer questions for creators right,
you're deeply involved with that.
The Snapshare card is great example of,
"How's my video doing after I post it?"
That's kind of the first team.
The second team, is loosely what we call
alternative monetization or monetization other than ads
and what we're trying to do there
is help creators earn more money with new revenue streams.
Some of the projects there are memberships,
Famebit for brand integration deals, merch, et cetera.
Basically trying to think,
how can we help creators make more money.
The third team has two components, one is copyright.
So, CID copyright tool.
And then the second part of that team
is the monetization program, YPP program.
Figuring how to make sure it's healthy.
Make sure that the creators are able to join the program.
Once you join the program, you get support,
you get access to all these alternative monetization
products, you get access to ads, et cetera.
So that's an important part of the creator's world.
The last team is a data team.
And we spend a lot of time collecting data, funneling data
to viewers, to creators and YouTube Analytics.
Some of the example products we have running there include,
we try to get alerts
if there are anomalies in creator performance,
so I can get an email every day now that tells me
if a creator's video is performing in a weird way.
So we can chase down and see what's going on with that
but that kind of gives you a sense of the scope.
And then the other area that I spent a lot of time on
is what we call or what I call it, my second hat.
And that's just trying to figure out
how to closely work with creators.
- Before we move off the first hat.
I'm curious if you could share how you know that
you're doing a good job and the teams are having success?
- That's a great question.
So one of the things we try to do at Google, in general,
and certainly at YouTube is to have what we call OKRs,
or objectives and key results.
So these are the metrics, the goals in words
and then the metrics to track them.
One of the things that I noticed when I got to YouTube
was we had a lot of platform level metrics but we spend
a lot of time thinking from the creator perspective,
what would be a good metric to answer that question
that you're asking.
And we came up with this idea of what we call,
creators making it.
So, creators that make a certain amount of money
on the platform, and make sure
that they can like make a job out of it.
And so we tracked that, we adjusted by country.
The second second thing we focus on a lot
is create a survey to figure out the satisfaction
of creators with YouTube.
- You know, speaking of that survey,
a lot of people may have seen it.
And they are like, well-- - Nobody looks at it.
- That probably gets shipped off to some faraway place
and put it in a drawer. - Yeah
- But we actually look at it religiously.
- Oh, yeah, we have a really nice dashboard,
you can drill into the questions.
We spend a lot of time actually with that data.
So it's super important that people,
if they can take a few minutes
and complete that information, it is put to good use.
- All right, we're gonna get into the second hat.
And I think the first item of the second hat
has to be the channel that we're on right now.
Where did this thing come from?
- So the context for that is,
again, when I started at YouTube,
one of the concerns we heard a lot from creators,
is we're not transparent enough and authentic enough
as a company.
We thought to have an experiment where we just,
kind of bypass a lot of constraints, shall we say,
and the larger organization has a lot of constraints.
And we thought, hey, let's do an experiment
where folks like yourself, could just come on a channel
and tell the creators what's going.
Focus on tech, so like the products that we're working on,
and have a quick loop with creators
so we can get quick feedback.
And it's really amazing to see
how the channel has percolated throughout the organization.
Now, we preannounce features, which we didn't used to do.
We recently asked about a feature
we're thinking about retiring, which we didn't used to do.
And so there's a lot more engagement, I think,
with the community and as you know,
it also forced me to learn how to edit videos.
- You definitely got the raw end of that deal.
(Tom and Ariel laugh)
What do you think were some of the things
that you learned about using our tools, using our platform,
from the kind of other side of the table
that you wouldn't have learned
if we didn't start the Insider Channel?
- Obviously, video is long form, it takes a lot to produce,
the pre production, it's like
the whole thing is just like much more complicated
than I appreciate it,
and the importance of the content also is very, very high.
Sometimes I hear from creators
that they get kind of hung up on debugging the algorithm
and all kinds of stuff or like tweaking this,
or folks talk about what kind of tags
and all kinds of like looking for the magic solution.
But I think it gave me and I think you too,
an appreciation for how important just the content is.
- Alright, let's talk about the second hat.
So you've got all these teams
that are working on all these crucial parts of
what many creators rely on but you've also spent
a lot of time getting to know creators directly
in spending one-on-one time understanding their challenges.
Can you share a little bit about how that started
and why you decided to do that?
- Yeah, let's see, we have great channels through
our partner managers and customer service and support
and we aggregate all that information.
For me, personally, I found that it's really helpful
to have a few data points that I get myself.
We have these creator summits where we,
once a year in every region,
we invite on the order of 100 or 200,
depending on the region,
creators to kind of come tell us how we're doing.
We have Susan and the rest of the executive team
usually present and talk and answer questions et cetera.
And what started happening is when I'd go there,
I'd meet creators who were pretty cranky with us.
I work closely with a few of those, a handful, and again,
they would text me 24/7 basically with problems.
And because I have access to a lot of tools, internally,
I could see a lot of what was going on than maybe
a normal customer service person would not have access to
and kind of go a little deeper.
And so it sure also, like help them a little bit
but really what it helped me do is aggregate a bunch of data
and really come up with new ideas,
with your help and with other people on the team,
to try to address these needs
and so it was like a direct feed.
Some of the examples that have come up
from that kind of work, for example, the self certification
that has recently rolled out to everyone.
Another example was pre-review video service.
I think you reviewed it a few videos ago.
- One thing I've noticed that you've done
is also within the company,
part of your second hat kind of activities involve
really advocating for the creator's perspective.
I'm curious, like, when you play that role,
how do you try and do the right thing for creators,
but also do the right thing for YouTube long term?
And how do you think about that balancing act?
- One of the concepts I think that's interesting
is the notion of long term versus short term.
And so, we as a platform optimize for the long term.
I'll give you some examples.
Creators sometimes think that the moment
we demonetize a video, we're not gonna promote it,
because why would you as a rational business, right?
And if you're thinking short term,
that could make sense, right?
Why promote something where you're not making money
and actually, you have costs for shipping the bits
all over the world?
But again, taking a long term view,
we know that delivering the best experience to the viewer
is what will keep the viewer on YouTube.
It's extremely important to the search and discovery team.
They're not gonna entertain, they're like,
"Hey, do this non-promotion, if we're not making money."
That signal doesn't even flow to that team.
It's super important.
I hear from creators, I used to at least,
when our notification systems were not working as well,
as they do now,
"Hey, notifications are kind of broken,
"and why don't you notify all of my subs
"for every video that I upload?"
And we did videos on that.
And we've explained it on this channel
of why that's actually a bad idea.
And in the long term for creators, it would be a bad idea
cause the data shows that
more viewers just opt out of the YouTube app.
It's kind of like a mix.
I wouldn't say that I'm just like a blanket champion
for creators in all costs.
I think sometimes you have to take a balanced approach
and that helps working with other teams as well.
- Yeah, I think in a way, because of that balanced approach,
you can probably get more done for creators in the long run.
So Ariel, when you talk about, quote on quote,
adopting these creators as part of your second hat work,
are there particular types of creators
that you spend most of your time working with?
- Originally, it was kind of random.
Loosely, I would say that there were a few, like verticals
that I've had the pleasure of working with.
The first I would say is what I call like edgy creators.
These are folks who create content,
for like older teens, shall we say,
maybe use some profanity,
maybe trip up on some of our policies,
maybe have some blood and gore for special effects,
like fake blood and gore.
That's been a really interesting vertical to look at.
And the pre-review service, for example,
is really useful for these folks.
So that's been one.
I've also worked with the creator
who does weapons, weapons related videos
and learned a lot about kind of our policies
and the world of kind of weapons versus firearms,
and we have very nuanced policies around that.
It's very important for us to get it really right.
And recently, I've started working a lot
regarding LGBTQ creators,
and making sure that YouTube works well for them.
Again, because I met a few really amazing LGBTQ creators
who were having issues on YouTube, with YouTube, et cetera.
So that's another effort that we've kicked off recently
and really thinking about kind of taking the same playbook
from these other verticals and applying it here.
So, thinking about, are there product implications
that we need to improve on?
Are there policies that we need to change?
How are we communicating with the community?
- Ariel, for some people who are listening,
they might think like,
"Wow, if I'm one of Ariel's adopted creators,
"I'm gonna get all of these extreme advantages
over other creators."
How do you think about making sure that--
- Oh yeah, no, no, that's not the way it works.
Working closely, the goal is to improve the product,
the platform for everyone by launching products
or improving our policies,
like some of the examples that I gave.
Of course, as a side effect,
there's maybe a little bit more understanding,
for example of how YouTube works,
the issue of like long term versus short term
and maybe understanding a little bit more nuances
about YouTube, but I don't think in any case,
that it's been putting anybody at disadvantage,
for example, like the policies are the policies,
nobody gets a waiver.
I can't go to somebody and say, "Oh, but this is my buddy."
The only option that a creator I'm working with has
is to change the videos to abide by the policies or,
whatever the policy impact is, they accept it.
So that's super.
It's actually a really important point to make.
Yeah, I guess like that self rating of the videos
is a good example where that may have started
with literally a handful of creators but because of that,
now we're able to offer it to all monetizing creators
and had we not done that it may never have,
kind of come to fruition.
- Yeah, it's been a super fun part of my job at YouTube.
- Well, Ariel, I know you're a busy man,
so I wanna thank you for spending time
on the channel that you helped to create.
(Tom and Ariel laugh)
How does it feel?
- We'll see how it performs, right?
Maybe it'll perform really badly. (laughs)
- I'm guessing it'll be top three
in terms of our last setup.
I hope, I hope, but we'll see.
- If people are interested in the areas that I do work on
then I'm happy to come back and answer questions, et cetera.
So, you know what to do, right?
Comment on this video.
I'll look at it, you'll look at it
and we'll figure out if anybody wants more of this
and if not, get back to my day job.
- And with that, I think we'll just say, keep it real.
- Thank you, and you keep it real, done.
(chuckles) - Always brother.
(Tom and Ariel laugh)