YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has offered some advice to Facebook: stick to baby photos.
When Wojcicki was interviewed on Monday at the Code Media conference in Huntington Beach, California, she was asked about her biggest fear when competing with Facebook.
‘They should get back to baby pictures,’ Wojcicki said, referring to Facebook’s push for more video content.
‘You always have to take competition seriously. You don’t win by looking backwards; you win by looking at your customers and looking forward,’ she said.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki (left) has offered some advice to Facebook.’They should get back to baby pictures,’ Wojcicki said, referring to Facebook’s push for more video content
In December, Facebook announced it would begin to promote videos more prominently inside its News Feed, leveraging the social network’s centerpiece product to build interest in episodic shows and compete more directly with YouTube.
The social media giant said at the time that it was tweaking the kinds of advertisements that run in videos on the network.
Facebook’s News Feed, which comprises posts from friends and businesses, is the first thing its 2.1 billion users see when they open the mobile app or go to the website, making it valuable online real estate.
In December, Facebook announced it would begin to promote videos more prominently inside its News Feed, leveraging the social network’s centerpiece product to build interest in episodic shows and compete more directly with YouTube
In August, Facebook created a video service, called Watch, initially with shows from the likes of Vox and Discovery Communications Inc but with plans to let people submit shows as they do on Alphabet Inc’s YouTube.
‘Engaging one-off videos that bring friends and communities together have always done well in News Feed and will continue to do so,’ the company said in a blog post.
Though Facebook’s revenue is growing quickly and the number of users worldwide is still rising, the company is struggling to keep people spending time on the site and sees video as a possible answer, Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser said.
‘They see that YouTube is still growing, rapidly. Facebook is not. So you can make the argument that they’re trying to increase total time spent,’ Wieser said in an interview in December.
As Facebook continues to invest in video, Wojcicki said YouTube will roll out its Red subscription tier much wider internationally to about 100 countries, from the five where it operates now.
During her interview, Wojcicki also spoke about YouTube star Logan Paul, who came under fire last month for posting a video of himself in a forest near Mount Fuji in Japan near what appeared to be a body hanging from a tree.
YouTube suspended the 22-year-old at the time for violating its policies.
But Paul returned, and has since posted a video of himself using a Taser on dead rats. That video is still up, with an age restriction.
When asked why YouTube hasn’t completely kicked Paul off of the video-sharing website, Wojcicki said YouTube ‘has a three-strike rule’.
‘If somebody violates three times then we actually terminate those accounts.’
During her interview, Wojcicki (pictured onstage) also spoke about YouTube star Logan Paul, who came under fire last month for posting a video of himself in a forest near Mount Fuji in Japan near what appeared to be a body hanging from a tree
Paul was universally slammed for uploading the video on New Year’s Eve from Japan’s ‘suicide forest’ where he and his friends had gone camping. They stumbled upon a victim hanging from a tree and kept rolling afterwards, even zooming in on his body
When asked why YouTube hasn’t completely kicked Paul off of the video-sharing website, Wojcicki (pictured) said YouTube ‘has a three-strike rule’. Wojcicki went on to say that Paul ‘hasn’t done anything that would cause those three strikes’
Wojcicki went on to say that Paul ‘hasn’t done anything that would cause those three strikes. We can’t just be pulling people off of our platform’.
She said that people have to violate their policies to be completely removed from the platform.
‘We need to have consistent behavior. This is like a code of law,’ Wojcicki added.
Late Friday, YouTube also updated a set of policies outlining new steps it could take against video creators who violate its guidelines.
Those include shutting off ad support, deleting YouTube Original videos by the creator and barring channels from being able to be recommended or put on its home page.