Even though as CEO Susan Wojcicki was on her maiden visit to India – YouTube’s largest user base – she cut her teeth in the media industry as an intern with the India Today Group way back in 1991. “I used to live in Kalkaji (New Delhi) and travel to the India Today office in Connaught Place by bus,” she fondly remembers. In fact, her first assignment as an intern was to write about the birth of e-mail. From there, Wojcicki went on to rent out her garage in the US to the Google founders and eventually became Google’s first marketing manager in 1999. In conversation with Business Today’s Rajeev Dubey and Ajita Shashidhar, Wojcicki talks about YouTube’s ambition, its brush with regulators, fake news and her unflinching faith in YouTube’s ad-supported business model. Edited excerpts:
The world thinks you are a media company. You are convinced you are a technology platform. How do you marry the two realities? What is the vision?
The vision for YouTube is that we become a platform for the next million channels. When I was here (in India) in 1991, there was one government broadcaster. Then satellite and cable channels were introduced, and now there are hundreds. Earlier, we couldn’t have millions of channels as technology didn’t enable it. The channels would have been too hard to find. We didn’t have search or recommendations or personalisation. Technology enables millions of channels on very specific topics. Our vision for YouTube is that we are the platform that enables the next million channels.
But regulators still see you as a media company and you will always be under those regulations.
We are not creating content; we create a very small set of content. We did an original show (ARRived) out of India a while ago. YouTube has millions of channels in India, so our focus is to become a platform for enabling all these other channels. We fall under a lot of platform regulations. But we are not providing content. People at YouTube do not create content; they are not editors or script writers or actors and actresses. They are engineers and programme managers who work with our creators and ad sales people. Most of YouTube is about the next million channels which tend to involve creators.
Do you see advertising-led models being threatened over time? Apart from originals, YouTube has also launched subscription-based premium offerings.
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